Ocean Grazing?

(By coincidence, just after I wrote this week's entry, below, the national media began reporting on charges of alleged cruelty discovered at large corporate dairy "farms." Once there were many small family dairy farms, places where the animals were so few in number that farmers could name each cow individually, and all were treated with kindness. By contrast, a disturbing number of corporate mega-farms so prevalent today, whose existence frequently depended upon buying out small family farms unable to stay in business, seem intent upon profits first and the animals' welfare second, or third, if at all. May I take this opportunity -- again -- to say bigger is not necessarily better. The word, growth, applies equally to the business world and cancer, and when each gets out of control the result can be horrific -- as it obviously has become because of the impersonality and cruelty associated with the practice of mega-farming. Cows, poultry and other critters often live in terrible conditions and it seems to be getting harder to produce farm products not contaminated with killer bacteria at some point in the complex network chain. Could be we really do reap what we sow.)

This seems ridiculous, yet it's been in my thoughts for years. Nobody likes to be, uh, "cowed," but this one calls for wild speculation:

In the 1980s many newspapers carried a syndicated column (via Chronicle Features) entitled "Earthweek: A Diary of the Planet," compiled by Steve Newman. A map highlighted global locations of interesting scientific events or findings of the day, and, to the delight of inquiring minds, Mr. Newman never failed to include the occasionally intriguing international UFO report. And there was some just down-home weird stuff, too, quirky little tidbits beckoning us to a place or incident both absurd and dark. So, I was more than a little curious and disturbed by "Earthweek" of September 11, 1989 when I read a paragraph entitled "Sunken Cow."

Newman culled a fair number of stories from various science news services, and this particular account described two people in a small submarine, involved in counting fish off Alaska's Baranof Island. While submerged to a depth of 690 feet beneath the surface, Tory O'Connell, a biologist with Alaska's Dept. of Fish and Game, and her pilot suddenly encountered for several seconds a dead cow resting on the ocean floor.

A videotape viewed by a reporter for The Sitka Sentinel documented this bizarre sight, confirming that the object did indeed seem to be a Holstein cow. The carcass's condition indicated that it hadn't been at the site very long, and ocean researchers (wisely!) declined to offer theories about the cow's guest appearance in Davy Jones' locker.

What to think? Obviously, this wasn't the cow that jumped over the moon. Or was it? If one accepts the high strangeness of cattle mutilations, including researchers' caveats that some animals appear to have been dropped from great heights -- leaving deep depressions in the ground -- almost anything goes. Whether any specific body parts were missing, of course, was not addressed.

One could also speculate upon the innocent passage of an ocean vessel crammed with cattle, a voyage troubled by The One That Got Away, but the implications of a cow abducted by otherworldly high-tech cattle rustlers of the night -- perhaps extraterrestrial morons who forgot that fish live in water, but even dead cows belong back on solid ground -- must be entertained. Or maybe somebody or something thought it best to conceal a horrible experiment far away from prying eyes.

Or. . . maybe the wretched creature, taking a rest from chewing grass in some far-off land, had a momentary creative or artistic spark, sprinted off at bovine speed and really did try to jump over the moon. Looks like the poor old girl almost made it, too, but for gravity.

USA Now Serving Ticket No. . .H80 (Haiti)

If misery loves company,

misery has company enough

(from Thoreau's Journal, September 1, 1851)

Death and suffering beyond comprehension. . .200 years of corruption. . .decades of political trial and error destined for failure. . .only flies and disease claim the trophies. . .contributions pour in. . .the generosity of the world. . .hundreds of millions and surely billions of dollars promised by the USA President. . .dollars of thin air. . .invisible dollars materializing through the lies of government printing presses . . .your children and grandchildren quickly becoming the new slave class to bail out debts no longer affordable, no matter whether hearts are in the right place. . .America shares, rewarded with condemnation . . .reviled for even daring to entertain the thought that maybe the nation can't do it all. . .but the more you give, the more that is demanded. . .the next time and the horrors to follow beyond the next time. . .still more earthquakes and tsunamis to thin the herds. . .because humans are the cheapest material on the planet, easy to make and easy to dispatch. . .aftershocks to remind all that the planet will always do whatever it wants despite bleeding hearts and self-accusations. . .natural disasters will always exist and they are not the fault of the USA. . .and there will yet be non-natural disaster conflicts, both large and small. . .things such as wars ...and if Yellowstone eventually blows again and destroys a considerable amount of the USA, much of the world will laugh and regret only the absence of pockets no longer able to be picked. . .so substitute the comic relief of imagining Haiti's prison remnants used to house Iran's cockroach-in-chief Ahmadinejad, Cuba's mummy Castro and Venezuela's prince of thugs Chavez. . .

USA beware. . .border states beware. . .Florida beware. . .30,000 (?) illegal Haitians scheduled for deportation but won't go "for now," as perhaps 100,000 more currently hide in the USA. . .in addition to how many millions of other illegals awaiting their self-chosen fate of leaving this country one way. . . or another. . .beware the floodgates. . .beware tens or hundreds of thousands of "just temporary" arrivals. . .beware the orphans because, no matter the country, the babies and children simply are not cute anymore. . .because of the quantities (well over 380,000 orphans, by early estimate), not the quality. . .though there was a time, yes. . .beware the agendas. . .beware the Third World which slowly pulls us under. . .dismiss the words of the Rev. Pat Robertsons (the devil made 'em do it) and the Danny Glovers (the evils of doing nothing at Copenhagen). . .beware those who will hate us forever, no matter what good or how much good we do. . .beware those whose only wish is to get to our shores and refuse assimilation. . .no desire to become true Americans. . .they'll show us, it's nobody's business how many children they can have. . .beware those who come illegally for opportunities which should not exist for them. . .beware the legal or illegal immigration of those without skills or talents, offering only super-sized families, the ability to populate with a flourish and a cargo of anonymous relatives yet to follow. . .vicious criminal elements. . .potentially vicious elements. . .gangs of convenience. . .machetes of desperation. . .madness. . .futility. . . the military increasingly used for nation-building and as crossing guards, often deprived of weapons in the course of duties never intended to be theirs. . .they are not the United Nations and must not answer exclusively to the UN. . .our military members who are expected to be brave and true defenders of our government, not nannies restricted and neutered by the wimps who lead them from safety behind Washington office blinds . . .and official blinders. . .officials who lie, condemn and court-martial and imprison fine young members of the Armed Forces merely for performing the work they're trained to do in Iraq and Afghanistan. . .Navy Seals. . .Army lieutenant. . .surely more to come. . .

Beware those whose mental capabilities don't extend much beyond wallowing in how they worship "Avatar," or some vastly irrelevant professional athlete, actor or actress, while everything that actually matters slowly crumbles to dust. . .technology enthusiasts longing to be the first to see Haitian chaos and decay on 3D television. . . beware the digital revolution which can locate and count the dead, determine statistics, and keep track of everybody's everything. . .beware national and world tyrants who wish to control and tax the Internet. . .beware a "suite" of taxes the World Health Organization wishes to impose via a popular guise. . .probably no better time to be paranoid, and don't ruin the mind's rush of endearing hypervigilance and gut feelings of betrayal with suppressive drugs or alleged therapists. . .stay real. . .

Voodoo capitol of the world. . .true believers may wonder, why have zombies not been called out by the houngan (Voodoo priests) to do the heavy lifting, serve refreshments and tidy up. . .the old song lyrics, do do that Voodoo that you do so well. . .half the Haitian population is said to believe Voodoo is real. . .in the White House, does anybody say, never let a good zombie go to waste, as they said for crises. . .pity the animals. . .the pungent ambulatory odor of death attracts more than flies. . .in political terms. . .the marriage of Catholicism and Voodoo in a country 80 percent Catholic. . .Christian missionaries and other messengers of a God circus who infiltrated Haiti, ignoring the veritable poster child for birth control, adding forced reproductive heat to the boiling pot. . .encouragement to produce far more people than the land should comfortably hold. . .poverty and resultant orgasmic disasters culminating ultimately in a putrescent liquid human mess. . .surgical and environmental amputations. . .limbs and pieces of humanity pepper the landscape. . .The Church. . .growing populations like gardens to be harvested in the worst ways possible. . . men and gangs dominating, raping and forcing women to produce children against their will. . .the joy of sex. . .surely, the only sane reason to produce so many people must be to feed extraterrestrial lizards, as in the (original) TV series "V". . .that the people saying "thank God" should be those who appreciate Planned Parenthood's aggressive goal to provide Haiti and other poor nations with aggressive birth control education, devices and procedures. . .to bill the Vatican for encouraging population growth without end in Haiti. . .helping to create the misery now encountered. . .the eternal holy quest to end suffering by promoting more of it. . .so as to remain relevant. . . should rightly pay for damages. . .let the invoice be presented in Rome by that devoutly religious and/or crazy woman who annually jumps barricades, hoping to meet the Pope for her own purposes. . .in the company of Voodoo priests for proper balance. . .

Beware the right hand of any faith-based or government do-gooders who do sleight-of-hand with the left. . .beware the next horror, and the next. . .at what point does overburdening compassion for the endless masses reduce a nation's ability to survive . . . it is not one world, but you and yours will always be forced to pay up, as if everything that befalls a population is somehow your fault and your responsibility. . .and so we helpfully juggle wars and natural disasters as enemies, international thugs and extortionists of the cloth plot against all. . .and even the greatest of nations can burn to the ground without evidence of flame. . . while you ponder the philosophical argument, who is better or worse off, their dead or your dead?

Newspaper Blanket / New Windmill Mystery in NY

We're incapable of becoming properly overwhelmed because there is so much, so very much, that we don't know about those mysteries which intrude momentarily into our existence. Yet, the snippets float by endlessly, just enough to remind open minds about a presence, comings and goings of extraordinary things beyond our control or comprehension. Some might insist upon secrecy in the belief that certain knowledge must be denied and obfuscated at all costs, while others profess an obligation to publicly reveal all things, both bright and horrible.

I grew up in an era when newspapers were still king, the crafty survivors of television's dawn because they did what fledgling TV news broadcasts wouldn't do -- report stories in remarkable depth, sometimes incorporating entire pages to do so. And without inexpensive video recorders available to the general public, one would necessarily clip and save newspaper articles of importance to the individual or group.

The inevitable marriage of the Information Age to electronic communication is a milestone but, we fear, not necessarily a step set comfortably in stone. With knowledge quickly gained comes knowledge, implications and common sense lost and doomed to be overlooked simply because events and time are recorded faster and faster, displacing mass in one area while piling mass in others. All the while, the classically trained print journalists die off, retreat or disappear, likely feeling as discarded and unwanted as tin soldiers abandoned in a landfill toy box.

That's why I consider myself so lucky when I can actually hold a newspaper clipping in my hands, an historical dated document anchored in printers' ink, information on paper threatened temporarily only by age and condition, and not by hard drive failures or cyberspace disasters. The deleted, the overridden, the replaced, the hacking and altering, the constant worries, gone.

The past. There are researchers out there who believe it's a mistake to concentrate too much on the older UFO cases, and I respectfully disagree. All manner of contraptions fly throughout international air space these days, and except in rare cases I suspect the process of narrowing facts down to a distinction between real UFO and not-a-UFO is tougher than ever, particularly because the level of official cooperation is almost impossible to access by the average researcher, now that everything is national security this and homeland security that.

Wallowing in older UFO cases is just fine with me. The 1940s, fifties, sixties and seventies especially, wow, those are the decades of remarkable, breathtaking UFO incidents, many of which were investigated in amazing depth by private investigators.

So today I'm featuring a couple of tidbits from years past, reminded again that newspapers are the rare tool whose archival hard-copy presence will eventually be sorely missed in a world ever more dependent upon digital images, fading pixels and deteriorating chemical media for knowledge. In some ways, prehistoric cave drawings were the best communication devices, enduring and still relevant once discovered ages later by explorers.

Syndicated newspaper entertainment columnist Leonard Lyons inserted these words into an article appearing across the nation early in February, 1967, and so few they were that one wonders if readers understood the enormity of their meaning: "During Col. John Glenn's visit to the Barberry Room he mentioned his feeling that certain reports of flying saucers are legitimate." Glenn, perhaps unaware that his brief comment would receive national press, portrayed himself as yet another astronaut somehow in the know about the UFO issue and not about to dismiss it. How unusual to find this gem mixed in with news about actors Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor and other members of the arts and entertainment community.

Almost seven years later, there was this tidbit from the New York Times (via UPI) of October 17, 1973: Retired U.S. Air Force officer and meteorologist James Thornhill, civil defense director for Columbia, Mississippi, was sitting before a radar screen as an unidentified object appeared on the scope. Suddenly, the object stopped moving and the radar equipment failed simultaneously. Shortly thereafter, people began calling him to report seeing unidentified flying objects in the sky.

Of course, it had been, what, around four years by then since the beloved Colorado University UFO project, at taxpayer expense and waste, had assured one and all through lies and misinformation that UFOs were nothing special. That's what we got, and this is what we have. So now, in 2010, the FAA, the gov, seems just to have passed off UFO investigative responsibilities to a private concern -- while its own written instructions still maintain plenty of room at the table for official reporting -- required reporting -- despite what we might think. The clock ticks on. (Read on. . .)

NY WINDMILL CRASH: For those of you intrigued by this sort of "thing," particularly because a British windmill was seriously damaged a year ago, perhaps in conjunction with reports of strange lights in the sky (ref. The Sun of January 8, 2009, England, headlined "UFO Hits Wind Turbine"), I bring you this: On December 27, 2009 at a windmill farm in the town of Fenner, New York (USA) an entire three million dollar windmill was discovered to have toppled over, right from its base, crashing to the ground in the night. Apparently, at least one person admitted hearing the crash. For several days, televised reports indicated that the incident remains a mystery. Last I heard, the power company owning the wind farm had hired an engineering firm to come in and investigate, and brief news reports following that maneuver indicated that the mystery remained. I tend to believe that everybody is/was initially concerned with the base of the structure, when -- you never know -- maybe they should have focused first on the blade condition. The incident may well have a rational explanation (terrorism seems to have been quickly ruled out, at least by the fast-trackers), but I'm just throwing this out there for those of you who tend to dive into these events. One ponders whether Charles Fort's wit might have suggested the teamwork of massive bird flocks dedicated to toppling assumed aviary threats, or perhaps a giant squirrel squadron, angered that perhaps they were unable to access a giant rotating bird feeder atop the structure. Should no eventual solution be found, um, one suspects the authorities will whip something plausible up anyway -- at least something that won't offend the masses whose preferences call for neat, clean and normal theories.

Flaming Undies, Blazing Skies

Jumpin' wombats, you let one (more) Islamic terrorist on a plane, next thing you know he sets his undies on fire and look what happens? The passengers, the crew, the nation, the whole world goes bonkers!

That's understandable. Personally, I wouldn't mind if flight attendants stashed lethal injection hypodermics somewhere between the peanuts and soft drinks to, where necessary, "calm" ruthless murderers, but what I don't get is the lack of firm official response anytime the airborne threat to aviation involves UFOs and not terrorists.

UFO history bleeds with airline/UFO encounters, and every one, no matter the drama, ends up hastily ignored or explained away by government or airline officials. They just want it all to go away, and that is so curious, so foolish, so dangerous. My question is, when passengers literally get thrown out of their seats because pilots have to engage in emergency maneuvers to avoid possible collision with strange lights or objects in the sky, why aren't these accounts as publicly important and urgent as terrorist actions?

Researcher Wendy Connors catalogued in her extensive Faded Discs audio collection a fair number of "Long John Nebel" radio shows From NY City of the 1950s. One classic program featured discussion of a fifties airline/UFO encounter, demonstrating an impressive instance of a cover-up, and I had mentioned this particular audio segment while reviewing one of her (now unavailable) compilations for the UFO Updates Web site (see link) a few years ago.

This was a Pan American Airlines flight from New York to Puerto Rico, and window passenger Jay Glick related to Nebel and his audience that it was around 3:15 a.m. when he suddenly witnessed "a solid-looking, luminous, large object with a greenish core to it, very bright, very large, moving at a fantastic speed...it looked as though it was going to hit the plane exactly." Accompanying the strange sight was a "tremendous roaring noise."

Glick believed the pilot noticed the object, too, because the airplane was thrown into a sharp ascent, causing sleepy passengers to be thrust from their seats as a collision appeared imminent.

To Glick's further amazement, the UFO also ascended, leveled off, reversed course and disappeared into the darkness. Nearly all passengers witnessed the episode, he affirmed, and some were actually hospitalized for hysteria and minor injuries after landing.

Nevertheless, about an hour after landing, airline officials speaking with firm resolve insisted to passengers that the airline regretted this "meteor" incident. When some passengers protested and asked how anybody could possibly believe this was simply a meteor, officials merely repeated the same words. I don't know the extent of Glick's involvement in determination of the story behind the story, but he further related on the Nebel show that seven other airline pilots also saw the object, and all were in agreement about its strange nature as each radioed reports to the San Juan airport.

All terror events are equal, but some terror events are more equal than others, George O?

Terrorists do things to the airline industry and UFOs do things to the airline industry. Why is one more important than the other? If UFOs messed around with young private Aussie pilot Frederick Valentich, who was never seen again, why didn't that "terrorist" headline intrigue the press as much? Oh, right, the unseen. Commercial airliners? Okay, read up on the Capt. Killian case, and don't forget the Capt. Raymond Ryan case, where Ryan and his copilot were instructed by federal government officials to break off from their Albany-to-Syracuse, NY flight and chase a UFO (all against the rules, the government denied it -- passengers held dangerously hostage by U.S. officials, you see, as private aviation was instructed to play what should only be military maneuvers -- but Ryan admitted it all on a TV talk show in the fifties before the truth was silenced).

What does a UFO have to do before receiving the official and widespread public attention awarded a terrorist cell -- maybe, say, hover over a runway at O'Hare International Airport during daylight, putting approaching and departing airliners in danger before escaping vertically through a self-made hole in the clouds? (Oh, right, November 7, 2006. . .)