wack up smel the coffee

Before Jesus and my mom met we had a subscription to 'Fate' magazine.



It was actually a pretty entertaining read. Anyway, when I was a little kid I used to sneak down into the basement with a stack of them and scare the living crap out of my self, reading about demonic possession, banshees (I was convinced there was one lurking around outside my bedroom window just waiting for me to relax my guard) UFO abduction, the Loch Ness monster, The Jersey Devil, Bigfoot and all the rest. In addition to that, we owned copies of: Flying Saucers: Serious Business, Chariots of the Gods, A Gift Of Prophecy, The Sleeping Prophet: Edgar Cayce,

...Seth Speaks, The Search For Bridey Murphy, You Have Lived Before, The Lost Continent of Mu....on and on. And on. And on and on.

As I read my way through all of this I came to the realization: "Goodness me, this here is some sad made-up old bullshit isn't it?" And time has borne this out...all of the above titles have been utterly debunked. I gotta say, though, if a grade school kid can figure this out without the need to consult with The Amazing Randi, well...

I think I was lucky in that I was encountering it at the same time I was running onto the great storytellers because I learned how to recognize the 'psychological structure' of fiction, I guess you'd call it. Really, though...you read some of that shit alongside Bradbury or Tolkein and all the seams and strings show up horribly. It becomes very apparent that fiction is precisely what it is...whether it be fiction written by people who have decided that anything that happens to pop into their heads must be real because they're thinking it (like Edgar Cayce or L. Ron Hubbard), or fiction written in a cold blooded attempt to deceive (i.e. Seth Speaks, anything by J.Z.Knight.)

That's one of the things I thought was interesting about it and still do...that the mind, even the malfunctioning one, has a way of organizing things that are drawn from the imagination in a different way than it structures things experienced as an exterior event. People who are recounting a 'real' experience seem to struggle to whatever degree with what they've encountered. They don't have answers. There isn't a theme or a plot. Of course, that doesn't mean that their perceptions were accurate...it just means that they perceived that 'x' happened and they want to tell you about it in whatever words come close to getting the job done. The other stuff always has some kind of giveaway narrative or thematic structure, however cryptic. I've always thought that's part of what makes it so seductive, though. That glimmering of organization you can just barely sense is, in fact,an OCCULT TROOTH...and the trooth is, the shit's made up.



What really makes me shake my head, though, is when people continue to believe in a supernatural explanation long after the subject has been conclusively exposed as fraudulent. Take crop circles for example.

I used to make hay highways the same way in the field next door; you'd take a big cardboard box and scoot around in it to flatten the stalks down. After we'd done we'd climb up the neighbors tree and go look at the designs we made. Come on! How obvious does it have to be?


This is more complex than a hay highway, but anyone with a compass, a straightedge and some basic design layout skills could draw this. To execute it, the only supplies you need are a scaled design, a few friends, something like a surveyors stake and string, and a length of board. Come on people. This should never have needed debunking. Yet time and again, even after the creators come forward and claim responsibility, people STILL INSIST SPACE ALIENS DID IT.



You find a similar reaction to the man who was responsible for the famous Loch Ness Monster photo. The poor guy came forward shortly before he died and admitted it was all a hoax, yet no one wanted to believe him. He still had the fricken' toy submarine he used to fake 'Nessie'!



Using the original prop, they recreated the photo, and lo and behold!

Nessie sails again! Irregardless of which people are still spending God knows how much money every year to go annoy fish in Scotland. Loch Ness has got to be the most well explored body of water full of the most pissed-off fish on the face of the earth. Not to mention home to the most well-documented case of non-existence. Every single year they rediscover the same exact thing: There is no Nessie, no swimming elephants, no mutant anaconda, no landlocked whales, no pleisiosaur. Truthfully I wish there were a Nessie, and I wish it was a pleisiosaur because it would be completely badass if if were a pleisiosaur, but it is not, because they are extinct. Coelecanths have nothing to do with it.

...innocent, and delicious

Everyone always bring up coelecanths here. 'Well, ' they say, 'the coelecanth was thought to be extinct but it turned out not to be, so there!' The problem with this argument is that people have been catching and eating coelecanth for hundreds of years in blithe disregard of the fact that some twat in a museum decided they didn't exist. Not so Nessie. The only eyewitness documentation we really have for the existence of a Loch Ness Monster is that time St. Columba yelled at it.

...don't make him admonish you. 'cos he will.

Of course once he yelled at the Loch Ness Monster it hoofed ass and nobody's seen it since, so there ya go. Blame him.



Then thars Bigfoot.
I cannot believe this shit is still around. This is one of those things thats so excruciatingly fake it makes spoon bending look plausible by comparison.
It stands to reason that if you run into a big, hairy, smelly thing in the woods, there's a better than 50% chance that IT IS A CANADIA
A BEAR.
It's the damn woods, people. Bears live there.

...someone at Steiff has a very peculiar sense of humor

Something a lot of people don't know is that your basic wild bear rolls in all kinds of nasty shit like a dog does, by which I mean they are BAD FUNKY. A bear also stands on it's hind legs and walks when it feels like it, and if it has an opinion it needs to voice it will. Your average person thinks 'bear' and pictures Dan Haggerty's loveable buddy. Or Dan Haggerty himself smeared in Vaseline, hanging from an engine hoist with his ankles handcuffed together, wearing leather motorcycle chaps and smoking a cigar. But when they run into something on the way to the outhouse at 2:am that's 6 feet tall, smells loudly of ass and screams when it gets scared, they don't think 'bear'. The conclusion they jump to is Bigfoot. That conclusion is wrong. It could be Dan Haggerty. If it smells like Vaseline it probably is.

Footprint casts? Don't even.

Look at this. That's just sad. If you're gonna fake something, put a little effort into it; geeze.

The 'hair' they find has always been proven to be either BEAR HAIR or PRIMATE HAIR.
Hint: we're primates. So if it wasn't a bear, that only leaves one thing: HOLLER MONSTERS.

...I seen 'em

Now I am here to tell you from my own experience that there are in fact some awesomely inbred nutty motherfuckers running around out there in the Mt. Baker Wilderness Area; and they don't wear pants of they don't feel like it. And just like nutty people will mess with you on the bus in town? Nutty people will mess with you in the woods, too. They do not care. If you are in the woods and they are in the woods they will mess with you. That's just how they roll. No, the big mystery here is why don't the bears get on the damn job and eat them? As we all learned from Timothy Treadwell, bears only put up with a limited amount of shit from nutty people.


Now maybe that's just Alaskan bears. Short-temperedness in bears could be regional; we don't know. Maybe Mt. Baker bears are the peaceful hippie-bears of the bear world. I'm not going to run out and stick a daisy up ones' tailpipe, though.


As far as UFO sightings go, I've known a lot of people who have claimed they've seen one. George, for example, has seen a UFO.

That's the category most UFO witnesses fall into, at least in my experience. Then there's the segment of the population who don't normally qualify for that distinction but who were having a 'George moment'.

And we've all had them, kids. Admit it. Eat some of that Alice fudge; you'll have one.

I did see something one time that I think might go along way towards explaining a lot of UFO sightings, though. I was standing on a hillside overlooking a small clearcut. It was a sunny day, but with large clouds overhead. I saw a movement up near a snag at one side of the clearcut, and as I watched a brilliant silver ball flew out of the top of the dead tree and circled over the clearcut a few times, during which I experienced a mild coronary event.



It was about the size of a cantaloupe and as shiny as polished chrome. Then the object tilted to one side. Immediately it darkened and resolved into a small kite shape, which sailed back into the snag and landed on a branch. I had my binocs, and when I got a closer look it turned out to be a little saw-whet owl.

Now those two pictures bear no resemblance whatsoever to each other, do they? But thanks to a trick of perspective and refraction, the shiny surface of the feathers on the owls' back caught the light in such a way that it reflected the sun like a mirror.
I picked up a rock and chunked it at the base of the tree, and the little owl startled up and flew around again-sure enough, when it was banked a certain way it appeared to be a silver circle for a few moments.

Am I saying that UFOs are actually stupid, highly reflective owls who might think they're really funny but aren't funny at all? Since that time I've seen the same light effect on swans and on, of all things, chickens. So yes, I guess I am. Some of them are birds, anyway. The rest of them are real.

No, ha ha, that is a joke! No, FirstNations is just running her toes through your brain there; I think UFOs are 99% horseshit, 1/2 % USAF and 1/2% birth trauma artifact.

Do I know* that? Nope. But neither do you, so get off my case.



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* If its certainty you're looking for, go HERE. They have a whole great big boatload of it.