October 2008 updates from Farah Yurdozu

After a busy and intense summer full of conferences and travels to Roswell New Mexico, San Jose California MUFON Symposium in October we had the second Culture of Contact Conference here in New Jersey at home. Culture of Contact art show is still going on where we are exhibiting our paintings inpired by UFO /ET contact.

Also my fifth book has published in Turkey "UFO Forbidden Zone" ( UFO Yasak Bölge ) in Turkish. In this new book my Turkish readers will find a lot of information about the recent UFO cases from the world and US. Also the history of ET / Alien contact for thousands of years is another important topic that I included to my book. Now I must get back to work...

New Gray Matters Up at BOA

A very neat ghost/trickster story by Lesley for her Gray Matters column on BOA.

Of Long Lost Cousins and Fire Eaters

I really do come from Circus Folk!

This has nothing to do with UFOs or the paranormal, but it does fit into esoterica in a way, after all, there does seem to be a Fortean, high strangeness air about circuses, clowns, and carnivals and they are often settings for supernatural or paranormal stories, both real and fiction. (Remember the HBO series Carnival? Excellent series, one of my favorites.)

Anyway, a very wonderful thing happened to me recently. I was contacted by, as it turns out, my second cousin, who found me via her searching on-line about her mother’s side of the family. She’s managed to find all kinds of things that she is sharing with me. Two bits of synchronicity in all this: one, I’ve been thinking very strongly about her all day yesterday, wondering why I hadn’t heard from her, when, to my delight and surprise, I found several emails from her in my e-mail today. (Her family had had something very serious to deal with; that's why I hadn't heard from her.) And, today, while following a link that had nothing to do with this, but some other topic, I saw, at the top of the page, this quote of Ernest Hemingway’s:

“The circus is the only fun you can buy that’s good for you.”

(I don’t agree with that, I hate circuses, at least traditional ones that use animals. And I can't stand clowns.)

My grandmother, Louise Gladstone McClocklin (Lee) and one of Louise’s sisters (my cousin’s grandmother) were known as “The Gladstone Sisters” an acrobatic, vaudeville act. Here are a few little items my cousin (I’ll call her Libby) shared with me. I've kept the original wording and spelling.

BISMARCK DAILY TRIBUNE, 29 JAN 1909, PG 2
TITLE: AT THE GEM

The Gem theatre has an exceptional bill in vaudeville for this end of the week, and at both performances last night the two acts were generously applauded.

The Gladstone Sisters, Louise & Hazel, the juvenile sunbeams,are stars,rarely equalled, and they are certainly big winners. Their harmony singing and acrobatic dancing, are new features in vaudeville acts....

RENO EVENING GAZETTE, RENO, NEVADA, 3 SEP 1910, pg 5
MECHANICAL DOLL TO BE EXPOSED AT WIGWAM TONIGHT

Tonight the mysterious mechanical doll will be taken up from the audience in full view of all, and the trick that has been so mystifying during the past week exposed.

This will be the last night you will have to hear that clever msical team, Stanley & Scanlon, alos that dainty little soubrette Minnie Baldwin.

Commencing tomorrow afternoon the GLADSTONE SISTERS, the child acrobatic wonders, the GREATEST child act ever seen in this city, will open a week's engagement at the Wigdom. This act is considered a GREAT FEATURE.

THE NEWARK ADVOCATE, 29 NOV 1906, pg8
NEWARK, OHIO

THE ORPHIUM
Theatre Beautiful.
Fouth St., Between Main and Church.
MAKE NO MISTAKES. FOLLOW THE CROWD
For ladies, gentlemen, children.
____________________________________
Week
Commencing NOV.26
_____________________________________
"CREO"
European Novelty
____________________________________
GLADSTONE CHILDREN
SINGERS AND ACROBATIC DANCERS
_____________________________________
TOMMY HAYES
Refined Musical Artist.
____________________________________
FRANKLIN A. BROOKS,
Song Illustrator
_____________________________________

THE MARION DAILY STAR, 30 OCT 1907, pg.9
MARION, OHIO
MARION FAMILY THEATER
___________________________
WEEK OF OCTOBER 28,
THE BARRINGTON CO.
High Class Spectacular & Musical Comedy,
TIPPLE AND CLIMENT
Comedy Musical Artista
THE GLADSTONE SISTERS Singers, and Acrobatic Dancers,
THE GREAT GAYLOR
A Contortionist,
EP ROWE
Illustrated Song,
POWERS MOVING PICTURES
Wonderful Flames

Matinees Monday, Wednesday and Sunday. 10 cents
Children's Sat. Matinee under 12 5cents

MANSFIELD NEWS, 5 NOV 1907, pg 7
MANSFIELD OHIO

EXCERPT
TITLE PLAY AND PLAY PEOPLE
... The juveniles get a good showing on the Orphium bill this week, the Gladstone Sisters and three of the five Benningtons coming under this classification and the bill of the week is one that will undoubtedly prove a winner, particularly with the ladies and the children.

The Gladstone Sisters, two clever little ladies, come on with a song and dance after which they give an excellent exhibition of
acrobatics, their good humor during the act being contagious.

Later, my grandmother and grandfather, and my uncle and father, joined up with the Tom Mix Circus. I’m hoping Libby will send me the scans of the actual articles from the original papers. I know there’s either a LOOK or LIFE cover of The Gladstone Sisters on it; my grandmother showed it to me when I was a teenager.

And Libby shared with me that another cousin “ran off” when she was a teen-ager, returning home a few years later, married to a fire-eater! How cool is that?

The circus seems to run in the blood. Which explains a lot, don’t ya think?

Dream in Black and White? Besides Being Old, You Had a B/W TV

A new study (Black and white TV generation have monochrome dreams) says that people 55 and over dream in black and white, while those under 25 dream in color, and the reason for this is television. People 55 and over grew up watching black and white TV, even if they switched to color sets the b/w imprinting had already been done on the brain. So, those 55 or older dream in black and white.

I don’t know if the study considered people in between, along with other factors, like personalities characteristics. I’m thinking creativity, or views and perceptions on spirituality, etc.

My husband Jim, is an artist. He’ll be 60 in a week or so. He always dreams in color, always has. He had a black and white set as a kid, before getting the big color TV. I’m a few months shy of 55, and I grew up with a black and white TV. I remember when we got the color set; a big day! Big old thing inside a cabinet. I was about ten years old.

I always dream in color as well. We’re both artists, writers and creative people, so I don’t know if that has anything to do with how we dream or not. I also have an unusually high rate of lucid dreams, hypnogognic and out of body experiences, all kinds of weird sleep-dream things.

And both of us have dreamed in color all our lives; I remember dreams when I was three, four and five years old, some as vivid as if I had them last night.

This last paragraph is interesting:

Miss Murzyn concedes it's still impossible to verify whether the dreams are actually in black-and-white, or whether media exposure somehow alters the way the mind reconstructs the dreams once we wake.

Brings up all kinds of questions. . .how can we ever know? Or, can we? Reminds me tangentially of what someone told me once, scoffing at my dreaming in color: "You don’t dream in color, you just think you do."

The Sign of the Green Alien, or Beware the Reptilians!

I'm posting this here because the following dream (I know, snore) has a bit of something to do with my previous post here about my OOBE. (My Utterly Completely Wondrous New Age OOBE)

That first dream/OOBE was wonderful, fantastic, amazing, and positive. This one, while almost silly sounding, was creepy and scary.

I'm reading Gray Barker's The Silver Bridge. It's been reissued by Andrew Colvin, author of Mothman's Photographer, so we all have him to thank for this. (I urge anyone interested in Mothman, or anyone just interested in Fortean stuff to read both Colvin's and Barker's books.) Copies of The Silver Bridge have been rare, and, if lucky enough to find a copy, you'd have to pay upwards of $400! Now you can get it for about $10.00. I'm enjoying the book very much. I have a fascination with Mothman that I can't explain; I've never been back east (except for one brief visit to North Carolina once) let alone West Virginia, so I don't know what's that all about. (My grandfather, part native American, was from Virginia, ... but that's a very thin connection, if any )

So I'm reading the book before going to sleep, and as I'm turning out the light, I had this weird thought pop into my head: that I better do some protection around me, because I don't want to encounter any negative entities or energies. Then I thought, "well, I wasn't planning to, and I'm tired." I turn off the light, and go to sleep. I don't know why I had that thought: I was enjoying the Silver Bridge, and not at all feeling creeped out or "scared," and certainly not thinking anything about Reptilians. As far as Mothman goes, I don't know what Mothman is/was, but I've never felt it to be Reptilian, not sure it's alien as in from outer space, or even convinced it's a negative energy.

I have a dream. It's almost funny at first. I'm very happy, very excited about something good that's happened, and I'm running down the street in joy. I run past a glass apartment building kind of thing, and I notice that there are little toy aliens everywhere, mostly green. Little rubber and plastic alien faces, and toys, and my first thought is: "That's so cute! How neat they have a sense of humor!" But then I quickly see that the building is empty, and I the thought occurs to me that it isn't funny, not one damn bit. We don't know what's going on, who the aliens are, if they're really even aliens, as in ET, and yet we're running around making cute little cartoons out of them. We're playing with fire!

But I don't have much time to dwell on that, because I'm happy, and running down the street to a local coffee shop to share my news. I go inside, and there are a lot of people in there, and at first, I'm glad to be there. Then I realize: "Goddamn!!!!! These aren't people, they're aliens! They're not just aliens, they're Reptilians!" And I see their faces change, from human, to a subtle olive green color, and their features change a bit. Not too much however, if you weren't paying attention, you wouldn't notice. And then they quickly change back. I'm freaked! I'm scared! And then they notice that I notice . . . and they're very angry about that. I try to deny that I've noticed anything, but they're not buying it. Then I get angry my own damn self, lol, and say really intelligent things like, "Who do you Reptilians think you are, anyway?!" which of course, just pisses them off even more. Suddenly I realize how really dangerous they are.

Here the dream changes. I wake up, scared to death, and don't want to go back to sleep. But I'm an adult and have to wake up at six in the morning, so tough for me. I try to go back to sleep. I immediately begin to experience that rushing, roaring sensation, and see whirls and swirls of green scales, just that, green and scales and the knowledge lizard intelligences are afoot. They won't stop, just swirling rushes of Reptilian green, and I know that that's what it is, and "they" are trying to get me to come out and play.

I say to myself that, as much as I would love to have another out of body experience like I had here, and trip the astral plane fantastic, not like this! I literally said to myself "I'm not going there!" and with great effort, woke myself up.

One more thing: I noticed earlier in the evening, while cooking dinner, there was a large green ink smudge on my hand, like something you'd get from a marker. It could have happened anywhere, and I do work in a school, but it I hadn't seen it before, and I have nothing like that at home that I can think of. A perfectly natural explanation, but a very weird bit of synchronicity.

Healing Images?

As I was waiting for the eye doctor today, I entertained myself by looking at the walls. Typical of doctor’s offices (including chiropractors and acupuncturists) there were a few large, nicely framed and colorful posters on the walls of the usual specific body parts of that particular doctor's speciality. In this case, eyes. These posters, charts and images of the body -- or its parts -- are seen in offices everywhere. I realized for the first time however how strange they are.

Large images of diseased, broken, sick, damaged organs. Detailed time lines of the progression of diseases. Close-ups of infected appendages, or internal disasters. To the chronically curious, like myself, these images might be mildly interesting, but what purpose do they serve? I wondered why would any patient want to see these images, while they’re in a place where they’re either ill in some way, or else they wouldn't’ be there (unlike Eastern medicine, where it’s preventative, not after the fact) or, where you’re in for a check up, hoping all is well. Most of us are anxious to some degree when we go into a doctor’s office, whether it’s routine or something more involved. Being surrounded by images of illness, and being used to it as normal, sends messages to our psyches that all is not well, and all will not be well.

What we surround ourselves with says a lot about what happens to us on different levels. What we say to ourselves goes much deeper than the surface; we're sending messages to ourselves all the time, and our subconscious takes it all in. Like attracts like. It’s like telling someone not to think of a white elephant. As soon as you say that, you’re thinking of a white elephant.

Why not have images that show preventative things one can do for themselves, encouraging images, healing images?

True, there were nice, pretty, Impressionist type images here and there; it wasn’t all gory red and sick-yellow oozing eyeball close-ups surrounded in gray lettering that announced “Macular Degeneration” and “Diseases of the Eye.”

The point is, why have these things at all in places of care and healing? How different would our health, and our health care system be, if we realized the impact of our surroundings on our health?

My Mona Lisa Pumpkin

I carved this a couple years ago--lots of people thought it was Jesus. It wasn't. It was the Mona Lisa. Happy Halloween, dammit.

victoria jackson and the end of the world

In my BOA column this week, I wrote about Roger Ebert's recent Creationism: Your questions answered post, and the ensuing fallout. Some believed he got all born again. No. I mentioned some who really did though, including Victoria Jackson. If the name sounds familiar and you can't place her, think: ukelele, handstands, Johnny Carson, the SNL bad years.
I'm not even sure how I knew she was born again, but I just found her website, and it's really a spectacle.

Some quotes:

"Obama, call me. I'll explain Christianity to you.
Maybe you'll get saved and start loving unborn babies."

...and this lovely one, full of compassion and love:

"I don't want a political label, but Obama bears traits that resemble the anti- Christ and I'm scared to death that un- educated people will ignorantly vote him into office."

She goes on to call him a liar, communist and a racist. We've all heard this rhetoric before, so I'm not sure why this seems so particularly ugly to me...


http://www.victoriajackson.com/

Just for Fun

You Are 65% Witch

You've got some pretty witchy stuff going on. Even if you're not a witch, you've got to admit that you're a little freaky. You have a strong independent streak - social norms be damned. More power to you. Luckily, the time when you would have been burned at the stake has passed!

Are You a Witch?

she is the wind

This isn't really esoteric, but it's a good story.

photo credit

I Don't Know How or Why

But Google likes me again.

I'm not sure for how long.

I'm still not getting TOO excited.

But, thankfully, I'm back with all my blogs. er, for now.

I'm still checking out various venues, like Live Journal and Square Space, but for now . . .

Okay girls, everyone in a circle! Spread that white light around!

Read it and weep, I know I did

I don't know what's going on but it isn't good, all my blogs are utterly screwed up and I have no access. Thanks, Google-Blogger! Well, you get what you pay for. So here's this: Orb News. Whatever.

Something About UFO-Mary

Two nights in a row have me dreaming about Mary, and Melina Mecouri, Rosalind Russell, and street theater. You can read about it on UFO-Mary.

Anonymity peeve

I don't know how much this ties in with esoterica, except that a lot of people in this field seem to do this, and it's really getting to me. Okay, here goes:

My pet peeve this week is people who post unpleasant comments about other people, researchers, authors, what have you, on various blogs, and who hide behind nicknames, user names, and avatars that don't reveal themselves.

In all my years on the internet, I have always used my own name. (I think -- it's been a long time.) And when I've commented on someone else's work, I've tried to be respectful when I felt it necessary to explain how I disagreed with their conclusions or their viewpoint. But over the past few years, I've seen a lot of negative comments about a lot of people, not just myself, that are posted in places where the person being discussed won't necessarily see them. To me, this is the same as talking about someone behind their back. And it's worse, to me, when the one making the comments won't even do so under their own, real name.

I understand that many people have good reasons for not wanting to make their identity public in this field. That's fine, I can respect that. But please don't use that as a mask to hide behind, in order to attack people. A great many people use nicknames, user names and avatars to protect their privacy and are very careful to be as respectful to others online as they are in person.

Let me state right here and now that if someone disagrees with me on any point, I'd much prefer to get a polite e-mail at kdolan@rochester.rr.com, raising the matter for discussion. I will be happy to respond in a respectful way, and to answer your questions and concerns as best I can. However, I do want to know whom I'm dealing with, so please identify yourself by more than a clever user name.

I've seen some really vicious comments about myself and about other researchers I know.This is not helpful. Disagreements and discussions are great -- I welcome them! But name-calling and personal attacks are not only unhelpful, but immature as well, and do nothing to advance our work in these fields of ufology, paranormal research, etc.

I know I can't please everyone, and I don't try to. I try to live in a way that will allow me to hold my head up each day, and not wince when I look myself in the eye in the mirror. That's the best I can do.

I'm sure others have had this issue come up. I've been talking with several people who have, just this week. How do you, the reader of this blog, handle it? I'm very interested to hear everyone's thoughts on this. Am I being unreasonable, or naive, or childish?

Okay, getting down off my soapbox now. Thanks for listening, everyone!

Adam Gorightly in Paranoia Magazine

The new issue of Paranoia Magazine includes the article James Shelby Downard's Mystical War, by Adam Gorightly, who runs the Untamed Dimensions blog.

Are You Brave Enough To Watch This?

Zeigeist - Addendum 2008

Heidi Hollis on Coast to Coast Tonight

This is late; but I just saw that Heidi Hollis is on Coast to Coast the first hour. Catch it if you can; some stations air the program again the same night, or visit the C2C site for their streamlink thingie, which I could never get to work. Either way, good for Heidi!