The “monster” was snapped off Seacombe Ferry at 9am yesterday by photographer Mark Harrison.
Paul Renolds, from the Blue Planet Aquarium, who studied the photos, said: “It is virtually impossible to actually identify, but this is the time of year when large numbers of basking sharks, the second largest shark species in the world after whale sharks, head towards waters off the Isle of Man.”
Sea creature captured in the Mersey by Mark Harrison
He added: “If it is not a basking shark, it could be a smaller species of whale or a dolphin because there are around 23 different species in UK waters.” - liverpoolecho
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(top: basking shark / bottom: a species of dolphin)
I'm drawn to talk about this not just because of Mark Harrison's awesome pictures themselves but of the sinking feeling I get when I read Paul Renold's making the obvious observation that the photos are of basking sharks or some kind of fucked up dolphin. Based on my reaction, I feel the engaging mystery of these images are devalued by Paul Renolds. He 'ruins' them. Before reading his explanation you look at them, especially the top one with the open mouth, and you think, of course, of that famous JAWS image of the seventies:
But what power did JAWS have--we knew it was a great white--that the basking shark explanation doesn't? Sharks hunt us, is one reason. We've all swam at one time or another in opaque water and imagined the icky things that could be about to grab us at any moment. A plankton eater or friendly dolphin doesn't have that food-chain cachet. But trumping even a giant shark is an... unknown. As all good monster movie makers know, the creature loses much of its power to scare once it's identified, or worse, seen in the daylight.
I noticed even watching CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON numerous times, that scientists belittle nature by naming it:
As the gang gets deeper down the snaky rivers of the Amazon, the film’s environmental message begins to emerge. We see Kay standing on deck, gazing out at the surrounding foliage, listening to the unearthly yowls of the wildlife concealed therein. It’s a primal scene—woman “tuning in” to the frequency of ultra-primitive nature—and she seems both horrified and thrilled. David comes up from behind and when she mentions that the howling unnerves her, he promptly dispels the mystery: “those are guyra monkeys,” he says. He’s the guy who has to bring the map into the wilderness, and name every plant while his impatient kids stand bored, waiting for something to happen
In the weird science of the film, and indeed of all such films, the others don’t believe Mark and David when they surface with reports of the gill-man. Eyewitness testimony can be considered “fact” in a court of law but means nothing to science, which cripples itself through its dismissal of everything “subjective” as if there was something that wasn’t. Carl Sagan waved away stacks of eyewitness UFO testimony while lamenting the lack of “proof” of alien existence. Our collective disbelief about things beyond our comprehension is itself beyond comprehension. This shows the fundamental impossibility of trying to think about nature objectively from inside an organic brain (sort of like trying to perform eye surgery on yourself without a mirror). Underwater photographs David took of the beast are hurriedly developed, but they end up revealing no gill man. Then Lucas tells the story of the man-fish, which he heard from Crazy Booly. Whit Bissell makes a snide remark. Here they are investigating a fossil of a half man/half fish, two esteemed scientists claim to have encountered just such a thing, and Whit Bissell dismisses Lucas’s story instantly as fiction! (Scarlet Street, #46 2003)
In their rush to name things, to nail down the phenomena of the world to names like 'dolphin', science tampers down the flames of insight --we don't see the unknown beast as its own weird thing, as if we're discovering it our first day in Narnia. And isn't that what draws us to cryptozoology - that giddy sense of the unknown--the ability to see things as they are and not wedged into kingdom and phyla-- before we fall back into our pre-set responses?
If an intrepid explorer finds bigfoot and then some scientist comes along and says that's not bigfoot that's a chimpazee familiaris -- a homo emanculus -- the mystery vanishes instantly. Sure there's the question "what's an ape doing in North America? Why haven't we found them sooner? But it's not as intriguing as the 'what the hell is it?' and 'is it even there?' questions of before. If the hairs from the chupacabra come back from scientific analysis as merely a 'dog' the mystery, as far as the science channel documentary is concerned, is over. But mystery is not a' 'problem' - it's not a detriment to science to have an unknown mythic monster on the loose. It's good for the community, gives them something to talk about over spooky campfires; and just because they made up a word for it doesn't mean it's not a monster.
In a way science feels it still needs to soothe the savage still cowering at the noises in the dark, "ah, it's not a demon it's a lupine familiaris." But whether we still need this is up to debate. In fact, I'd argue the reverse.
One of the main benefits of LSD is the way in inhibits neurotransmitters which recognize audio and visual stimuli --a process elementary to survival, but highly deadening to our sense of being alive to the universe. This 'blinders' effect tunes out 90% of the stimuli around us. A rising sun can be akin to a visit from God before the click in the brain that says 'no, bro, that's just the sun' - instantly we're taken back to science class, trying to stay awake as we learn about atoms - the sun is thus associated with boredom and the magic is lost.
Maybe instead of jumping to call something 'just a basking shark' these scientists can make a big show of excitement, and rush to the scene and pretend a real find is there in these pictures, withholding their knowledge of the basking shark and letting us draw our own conclusions. But that would mean admitting the right brain needs attention, and science--a notoriously left-brained lot--is as wary of admitting the right brain's import just as we in the right brain--artists, intuitives, psychics, mystics-- are wary of admitting the left's import. As long as there's that rift, bad blood will continue to flow when science pounces on a phenomena like those cool photos above, labeling them this or that before we have a chance to get excited about the true wonder of nature. It's not nature's fault. Nature didn't label that monster a shark, a dolphin, or anything. If we want to call it a dinosaur we are not too far off. Sharks are as old as time itself. The problem in the end is one of semiotics. Language is both our prison and our escape route. Here's how I ended that Creature article:
The concept of Man at war with the environment is as old as history, and it is only recently with our advanced technology that we are put in the position of having to act as caretaker for what once threatened to devour us kicking and screaming on a nightly basis. Early ancestors would surely have been comforted thinking that one day their distant progeny would be able to master the animal kingdom and wipe the wolf and the tiger almost into extinction. Now however, Man, in his neverending quest to label, quantify and understand is actually destroying everything he touches. In trying to unravel the mystery of nature, he unravels himself. The swamp and the stars are the same, they are his own unknowable self. He is blasting rotenone into his own face and staggering down the street of evolution like a stoned tourist, robbing everything he touches of its holy power.
As is sometimes the case when I send Mr. Flower something from the internet - In this case the link to the amazing new tool on Google that sorts 5.5 million books since 1800 by WORD - http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/ - and this is what bubbled forth: ===============================
Christ Came Juggling
by Eugene Warren
Poem from Winter/Spring 2005 inside back cover.
Christ came juggling from the tomb,
flipping and bouncing death’s stone pages,
tossing those narrow letters high
against the roots of dawn spread in cloud.
This Jesus, clown, came dancing
in the dust of Judea, each slapping step
a new blossom spiked with joy.
Hey! Listen—that chuckle in the dark,
that clean blast of laughter behind—
Christ comes juggling our tombs
tossing them high and higher yet,
until they hit the sun and break open
and we fall out, dancing and juggling
our griefs like sizzling balls of light.
Eugene Warren
Drones from Above
by J.S.Flower
Written after reading on the 129 day of 11... using borrowed words:
The drone came out of nowhere
dropping death’s stone pages
some dastardly controlled machine
sending the package earthbound
This Osama/Obama dilemma of serious disillusioned "leaders" both
Smacking history upside its collective head
Hey! Wake up you death mongering idiots...
Using the word perfection to describe this event on 60 minutes,
Joe thought it was exhilarating, watching from afar
this shows the depth of justified abhorrent behavior
via the screen of deception
Like using Geronimo's name as part of this operation
No respect for anything, sanity left naked, sizzling, like drones from above
=========================
Now, I've had similar gas experience getting my wisdom teeth out - when the gas hit it was like being 'sucked under' by a giant wave. Then I felt myself at the bottom of a huge deep hole; I could hear the dentist far above me, complaining about one of my teeth: "man, these are some roots!" Finally I heard a big crunch and he breathed a sigh of relief as the tooth came out. I didn't feel any pain, just heard the crunch echo above me, like a tree being hit by lightning...I was safe down in the hole, and then I dissolved into oceanic space until I awoke... in pain.
What puzzles me isn't the validity of these experiences, or why Lon chooses to mention the particular one above in his blog, but the great problem of separating 'real' experience vs. the 'possible' or completely subjective, especially based on what we are learning about the true nature of the universe as related to perception. For someone who is not a scientist, any scientific explanation of unusual phenomena can sound like a dismissal, yet that may not be the case. A psychologist's idea of a hallucination may be more respectful than we'd think on the layman side of things. But is there ever such a thing as "just" a hallucination, when our perception of matter as solid is itself a hallucination? Who decides which is which?
Science privileges a kind of basic blindness to magnetic energy patterns as being 'the norm', even while admitting that physical matter is really just energy. In other words, if we see things as vibrating energy--as they really are--we are considered to be 'hallucinating.'
Flash back to November 1991 - I was very sick--a huge terrible fever-- and woke up one early evening around 6 PM (it was dark already, being the winter) after 23 solid hours of writhing in fever delirium. Drenched in sweat, shivering, stuck halfway in the grips of sleep paralysis, I sensed a presence in my bedroom. I fought my way out of the SP and sat up in bed in time to see this tall demonic figure looming over me (see composite illus. above). My room was dark but I could see the highlighted outlines of the being via the moonlight and the streetlight outside coming in through the window, reflecting on the spines of books on my tall bookshelf. It was 'invisible' though I saw every edge, tooth and the eyes and body (it seemed to manifest itself via the air around it). It was smiling and laughing noiselessly at me, amused that I could "finally" see it there in my room. All my hairs stood on end; I kept screaming at the top of my ravaged lungs, in a blind panic: leave! go! Go AWAY! It smiled wider--laughing at me (but not making a sound)--and gradually, almost mockingly-- faded back to moonlight reflections on my bookshelf. I remember feeling awed at the perfection with which every detail of the creature fit perfectly back in the scheme of the light on the bookshelf. I ran downstairs, terrified and elevated, feverish, raving. My mom downstairs preparing dinner hadn't even heard my screams.
I've seen demonic hallucinations here and there in waking 'altered states' before and since, but never were they allowed to get "that far" before I'd pull away my attention. I instinctively realized the best way to deal with these beings is to ignore them when they're still at the "shadow" stage not stare and recoil in horror or fascination because they can kind of feed on fear energy to manifest themselves into your consciousness, and from there it's a short jump to actual corporeal presence, at least on some pan-dimensional level. It's mind-boggling to watch a demonic figure form itself from, say, the patterns of a fire in a fireplace on the side of leather couch, or a painting on a wall, getting closer to you and more sinister the longer you stare. Scientists dismiss this stuff because they have a name for it: "hallucinations." But if you follow real science to the end of the quantum physics rainbow, then you know: if you see it, it exists, because you're seeing it, and just seeing the thing gives it power to manifest, as part of the subjective bioverse.
Maybe science is trying to protect us by saying "Look away!" or to belittle these visions as inconsequential remnants of an archaic anthropomorphic visual cortex (we're hard-wired to find faces in everything) on fire with fever or drug withdrawal. When one thinks of the Catholic exorcist strategy of ignoring telekinetic displays from possessed patients or houses, of refusing to be shocked or scared or acknowledge anything's out of the ordinary, this is perhaps a clue of how science uses skepticism as a way of protecting us from being invaded. If we look at these things too long with too much fear, who knows how corporeal they may become?
When I was a small child I was obsessed with the big question of genetics: Not 'where do babies come from' - I thought I knew where (mom's stomach)--but rather how my father's features magically came into me without him being directly involved in my birth. I remember never getting a straight answer. My mom eventually agreed with my hypothesis that it was a kind of magical transmutation brought on from being in love, and so I imagined my dad's genes coming over to my mom and into my embryo via something like 'love radio'. I struggled to grasp this, but knew it didn't quite fit either. Something was being withheld from me; I wasn't 'ready' for the truth. This was and is the great human mystery that confounds all small children.
In my opinion, evolution and creationism are both examples of 'love radio' concepts. They too mask the traumatizing real of who our true father is and how his genes got 'in us.'
The issue of mankind's origins via either evolution or the Old Testament seem much the same as my mom's original explanation and my own elaboration which she begrudgingly accepted. Our resemblance to 'the mother' - the original man/neanderthal/ape is clear enough from our cursory resemblance, but the father element--who he is and how we got his genes (the 97% we term junk DNA) has never been adequately explained, with the Darwin line being adhered to by our motherly scientists who have been brainwashed to overlook the most obvious lapses in narrative logic simply because the alternatives sound too much like science fiction or religion. Their reticence is akin to mom's withholding information about sex because I was too young. We, as a species, are similarly considered too young to know where our cosmic 'daddy's' genes come from.We're supposed to buy the idea of natural selection gradually changing primates to man, even without any fossil evidence for the many 'missing links' between. While it's supposedly plausible, this doesn't feel true to me anymore than the love radio theorem I proposed to mom.
What's funny is that these same Darwinists --ignoring the lack of fossil evidence showing millions of years worth of 'in-between' ape man and modern humans--refuse to believe UFOs due to lack of evidence!! Such hypocrisy is expected in parents, but surely not mainstream science. Our current situation of UFO denial is like if my mom promised to tell me about 'the secret' of inheriting my dad's genes when I was older, then forgot her promise, got used to denying and obfuscating, and now I'm in my 40s and she's still refusing to tell, still insisting my love radio concept as right.
I mention all this as build up to a hallucination/vision I had a long ago, wherein a jet black evil alien source ripped back, like a tide, the delusional surface of our linear temporal reality, like a Mad magazine gatefold opening back out to show the full picture, showing whole chapters missing from our history, completing and changing the content utterly as it went along, the way a child might grow up to suddenly inherit his father's staggering debt, or learn some awful truth that's illuminated in a flash the awful prison of existence. Our history books all instantly-- along the ripple line of this tide--changed to include alien domination since the dawn of time. Books morphed right there on the shelves in accordance with our true situation, and all humanity instantly forgot there ever was a time this was not always so. People who smirk at the idea of the apocalypse don't realize how quickly the veneer of our civilization can be just wiped away in an instant.
A good example of what I mean can be found in the footage of the Japanese tsunami, where modern civilization is seen as banal, routine, and intact at the start of a five minute video, and by the end, completely and forever changed. You can sense the change even in the attitude of the camera man, who first films with a kind of jaded 'ooh look a that!' impunity, but within a few eternal minutes, has begun seeking higher ground and is overcome with fear and compassion for the hundreds of victims around him:
Who knows, maybe we'll wake up one day and even this blog entry will be different. And headlines in the papers wont say "Alien Menace Revealed as Truth" it will skip all that and presume we've always known and suddenly we will have always known and never even remember a time when our evil alien masters weren't in charge. It will be similar perhaps to how learning about sex forces children to restructure their entire belief system to that point; pride prevents them from remembering a time when they didn't already know the truth. When our little bubble of space time amnesia is popped, we won't even remember our last birthday let alone a time before disclosure.
Of course this all speculation, but if it feels true, maybe it is. But why is Nostradamus' speculation revered and the rest of us get a priori dismissals? Certainly once you admit the reality of alien visitations--even in theory--a whole vast web of unpleasant concerns opens itself up, and that's the only thing that explains the reason, I think, that debunkers and CIA agents feel such a need to prove it's all hoaxes and hallucinations. They're plugging the dam with their finger, because once that dam breaks their positions of power will be as gone as that Japanese town in the video above. We wont just jump one level in consciousness, we'll jump ten, and the first nine will vanish beneath the waves.As always, we make the leap right as the ground we were standing on falls away beneath us.
Mom, Dad, and phallic probe / trident
Believing in UFOS doesn't mean anything, technically. After all, a UFO by definition is unidentified. When we 'believe' in aliens they won't be UFOs anymore -- they will have names, like Hannebu II, or Orybrid ZX, or the Triangle 5.9 Turbo, new from Mistubishi Galactica. Our world will seem a lot less small, and scientists, Darwinists and Sunday school teachers alike, will have to scramble to explain why they're not the latest version of flat earth society, or phrenologists.
Even mystical visions can trick you that way. In September of 2006 I was meditating one afternoon after work, when I felt the sky and wall dilate open behind me an a giant electromagnetic hand touched my shoulder, enlightening me instantly. For two months I was completely egoless and in tune with love for my fellow man. But I got carried away and would up making a pass at this girl I was infatuated with, who rejected me and I felt that inner God voice sneering and laughing at me the whole subway ride home, as if everything from the hand of God on upwards had been a way of conning me into risking my soul for this girl and getting shot down. Now that I was in such heartsick misery, I felt the god feeding off me, like I was a slot machine that he'd been rigging up and now was paying off big time, all that holy soul energy he'd cultivated he now stripped off me like clothes for the poor.
Now maybe I was just 'imagining' all this - it was 'magical thinking' - but at the same time, so what? It's all just perception and we have to go on what feels more real, especially if we're writers and artists. Whole months can go by these days that don't seem as real as that godly hand on my shoulder, or the glowing demon in the bookshelf. .
There's a certain assumption among left-brained scientists that hallucinations are somehow 'less' than reality, but it's the opposite: they're more. They spill through when our perceptions overheat and dilate, letting in more information than is normally good for us. Our senses have 'blinders' on them that filter out up to 90% or so of all the information coming at us. Hallucinations and visions could be said to be moments when the blinders fail and dreams and reality leak into one another-- but isn't this in a way a much more 'real' situation? As we spend 1/3 of our life sleeping aren't we rather too quick to dismiss everything we experience with our eyes closed as just fluffy nothing? Meanwhile memory and reflection change even the most concrete experiences, shrouding and distorting the more we record, write, and relay them.
My point is vague, but that's perhaps intentional... anything more concrete tends to dissolve the glimmering outline of the truth - a truth that is fluid as an ocean of mercury, or 120 channels of satellite television with a remote that's stuck on changing channels every second. Perhaps we should begin concerning ourselves less with evidence and empirical truth--trying to convince those who don't want to be convinced--and instead concentrate on evidence's immateriality, and the passing, holographic nature of all things. The minute we look too long at a single flickering shadow, we're enslaved by draconian obsession, the need to prove what we're looking at is 'real.' When we can worm our way free of needing to prove or believe anything; when we move past true/false, right/wrong, life/death and all the other phony dichotomies, only then will we be ready to learn where babies truly come from, and to gaze unafraid and unstoned into the eyes of our true Medusa Mother.
TCI has a bevy of great thinkers and writers - here I present Regan Lee with The Shaman's Cape(Rick Phillips) --------------------------------------------------
This was originally published on Binnall of America's website on my bi-weekly Trickster's Realm column on 12/26/05 and reposted on my Saucer Sightings blog, which is an archive of my own UFO sightings and encounters. The article has been edited for this post. ------------------------------------
The Shaman's Cape
About twelve years ago I was visiting friends who were house sitting for a mutual friend of ours. The home owner traveled to Mexico frequently on business; he owned a store in Oregon, and brought back folk art, books, and ceramics to sell in his store.
As I was wandering around the home looking at his extensive book collection, I noticed a large cape hanging on the wall. This cape was very unusual. It wasn’t made of any type of cloth, but seemed waxy and stiff, with little “horns” or large thick thorns protruding from it. The cape was a darkish lime green color. While the cape wasn’t made from any cloth like material and didn’t look like it’d be comfortable to wear -- certainly not practical -- it was obvious this was a cape indented to be worn.
I touched the cape,rubbing my fingers on its smooth surface, being careful of course to avoid those white yellowish stud things that were clearly sharp enough to really hurt if touched. I appreciated the cape for its history (whatever that may be, since I didn’t have a clue) and was drawn to it for some reason -- I couldn’t stop running my hands down the cool smooth surface. Even while I was attracted to the cape, I felt uncomfortable around it at the same time; I didn’t like it. It was big and ugly, a sickish green color, and subconsciously, it annoyed me. It just seemed out of place.
I had planned on staying to visit with my friends but suddenly felt extremely tired. It was the middle of the afternoon and a beautiful day, but I had to get home -- I was just so suddenly exhausted. Fortunately I didn’t live far, just a couple of miles. Yet riding my bike home on that beautiful day was so damn exhausting. I was losing focus; as if I were coming down with the flu yet I didn’t feel sick, as in ill, just ... unexplainably tired.
As soon as I got home I headed right for the bed, flopping down and grateful to finally make it home. Almost immediately I began to leave my body; one of those OBE states that happen to me spontaneously and that I haven’t been able to control since I was a child. I wasn’t asleep, but not awake exactly, yet I was consciousness of the bedroom, the open window, the sun coming through the screen and other mundane things. At the same time I was paralyzed but felt myself rapidly leaving my body. I could hear the sound of whistles and flutes coming from a distance away, then getting closer. These musical sounds were not coming from outside (like a neighbors house or stereo) but from whatever place my astral body was going towards...
The next thing I knew I was in a deep sleep. I remember visions of chanting and signing, the flutes and whistles again, the cape draped around someone, a man. I couldn’t see his face. We were somewhere in the desert, or some rural country area. It was night and the stars were numerous and very close to the ground; I could touch them if I just reached out far enough. This was no dream; it was as real as this moment now, sitting here typing this. The memory of the desert ground; so hard, with dusty brown bits of soft dust, the coolish night air, the smells of earth and night, the music of flutes, bells, chanting. I was next to this man in a cape, his cape, face unseen, doing a jerky kind of wheeling, turning movement beneath the stars.
When I woke up, it was dark, and I felt as if I’d been poisoned. Not actually physically sick but I mean, I felt as if someone had given me some kind of sleeping pill or drugged me in some way. It took me a very long time to get back to reality. I felt sluggish and my tongue felt thick. This feeling lasted for a couple of days.
A day or two later I found out that this cape was from Mexico and had belonged to a Shaman. It was used in special ceremonies. I hadn’t mentioned this to my friend; it was the other way around. He had told me, quite spontaneously, that he was told that the cape was used for magical purposes that involved whistles and dancing, and was performed out in the desert, away from towns and especially the Church. How or why our friend managed to get this cape I don’t know, except that was a collector of what we call folk art and folk religious items. To those that participated in these dances and ceremonies, those are just labels used by outsiders.
Desert Visitation: The Green Warty "Man"
This incident happened about twenty-five years ago or so. I was sitting on the bed reading. I wasn’t in bed; it was still early. I was simply on top of the covers, dressed, reading my book. My husband was in the other room. I had what I call a “mind post card,” -- it’s an experience that happens every so often, where the picture, absolutely vivid 3-D full color image, is “inserted” into my mind with a sharp suddenness. It’s as if someone had literally slid a postcard or a slide of an image (and very often a moving image) into my head. I don’t know where it comes from, or why it happens. Usually it’s a telepathic thing: a preview of something that occurs later that day, or within a day or two. This time however, it wasn’t a prediction of something; it was a “visit.”
This “mind post card” was of a dirty lime-green being with warts or bony stubby nubs all over his body. He had two little stubs or buttons at the top of his forehead; not horns or antlers, but the suggestion of such. I just “knew” that this being was male. It wasn’t human, but it wasn’t animal. It was maybe closer to human than not, but definitely not human. He was sitting in profile to me, squatting down actually. We were out in the desert -- or, he was. At this point it doesn’t matter; it was as if I was transported, or his whole world superimposed itself onto mine. I was there with him/it. We had entered each other’s realm of existence. Somehow I had been transported to his desert, and his desert had moved closer to my world.
He “saw” me and turned his head to look at me. He slowly grinned at me, but this was no happy smiley expression! He was a nasty piece of work! It was clear he knew exactly how I was feeling, and thought it very funny in a sadistic way. He was also a little irritated I was there -- or, he was here -- that we were in each other’s worlds.
I was so damn startled that I screamed. With that scream he popped out (or I was snapped back to my own reality.) And again he seemed irritated, it as if he wanted me to stick around so he could toy with me. He was mad I had screamed and ruined the fun. Such a temporary and special event gone in a flash.
To this day I remember that experience with a chill. I don’t associate any UFO experience or connection with this (although, with all the high strangeness that often accompanies UFOs who knows) and I wouldn’t say it was alien. Not alien from another planet; not even alien from this earth. But I had the sense it very much belonged here and was of the earth, and it belonged here, if such judgments can be made on these things, more than humans. I had the feeling it was indigenous to the earth.
As the gang gets deeper down the snaky rivers of the Amazon, the film’s environmental message begins to emerge. We see Kay standing on deck, gazing out at the surrounding foliage, listening to the unearthly yowls of the wildlife concealed therein. It’s a primal scene—woman “tuning in” to the frequency of ultra-primitive nature—and she seems both horrified and thrilled. David comes up from behind and when she mentions that the howling unnerves her, he promptly dispels the mystery: “those are guyra monkeys,” he says. He’s the guy who has to bring the map into the wilderness, and name every plant while his impatient kids stand bored, waiting for something to happen
