UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

Maybe, it has afflicted you on more than one occasion. Perhaps, now and again. Possibly, it’s something that has never bothered you. Or, you get it regularly. What is it? Well, I’ll tell you: it’s the issue of how certain Ufologists, researchers and witnesses to UFO phenomena find themselves on the receiving end of weird phone-calls. To some degree this ties in with the threatening Men in Black. On other occasions, the whole thing is just bizarre. With that said, I’ll share with you a few examples. On November 9, 2014, the Marshall family of Perth, Australia had a strange encounter after seeing a huge, black, triangular shaped UFO flying completely silently, and at a dangerously low level, as they headed home after a night out on June 3, 1999. Although they did not tell anyone about their experience (at least, not at the time, anyway), late on the following night the phone rang. It was a man with a strange and somewhat European accent who warned them not to talk about the craft they had seen [italics mine]. In this case, the family forgot about the experience until years later when they saw a TV documentary on the Men in Black enigma – which referenced the issue of the MIB making threatening phone calls to UFO witnesses. Today, the family is solidly convinced that what they experienced was full-blown intimidation from a menacing MIB. I had to agree, when I read the facts.

Point Pleasant, West Virginia is – beyond any shadow of doubt – noted most of all for its wave of sightings of the infamous Mothman, between 1966 and 1967. In 2014, however, the town played host to something even stranger. The witness to the weird affair was a local woman named Denise, who emailed me the details on May 23. As Denise explained, she was jolted from her sleep by the sight of a young boy looming over her bed. This was no normal boy, however: it was one of the dreaded Black-Eyed Children – pale-skinned, black-hoodie-wearing kids who are noted for their completely black eyes. Denise tried to scream out, but her vocal-chords were paralyzed, as was her entire body. The eerie boy stared at terrified Denise for a few moments, then retreated into the shadows of the room and vanished. It was a nerve-jangling experience that Denise has not forgotten. Nor has she forgotten a strange wave of hang-up phone calls that occurred across the next three nights, and all around 3:00 a.m. A connection? Denise believed so. As did I [Italics mine].

(Nick Redfern) Point Pleasant, West Virginia

August 2015 was a time when, for me, telephone problems were absolutely rife. As an example, Whitley Strieber invited me on his Unknown Country show to talk about my MIB book and we experienced endless amounts of very strange interference and odd sounds on the line. The exact same thing happened, at a later date, with Coast to Coast AM – something which took on even stranger proportions when my landline phone suddenly quit. So, I proceeded to use my cell-phone as a back-up. The battery drained astonishingly quickly, despite being fully charged. And, so, I had to hastily dig out of a cupboard an old, spare, cordless landline phone, which finally allowed us to complete the show. You’ll see from the cases above, all of them were relatively close to each other: from 2014 to 2015. There was more, too. A lot more. The strangest, one, however, took place back in 2003. I had returned from a trip to Taos, New Mexico, where I met with a now-deceased UFO researcher/whistleblower, Dan Salter – a man who claimed insider knowledge of the Marilyn Monroe-UFO controversy. I interviewed the guy and then we wrapped up. So, after getting home, I crashed in the sack. For a while…

It was around 2:00 a.m. and the phone rang. None of us like those situations. And all for the same reason: that, maybe, the voice on the other end will be calling with bad news. In a half-asleep state I ran into the darkness-filled living-room and, without thinking of reaching for the light, fumbled around to grab the phone. As I picked it up, I heard what sounded like screeching static, such was the ear-blasting level of the volume. In a few seconds, though, I was able to figure it out. It was a recording of Marilyn’s never-to-be-forgotten rendition of “Happy Birthday” for JFK at the third Madison Square Garden in New York on May 19, 1962, even though JFK’s actual birth-date of May 29. And the recording was playing over and over on a loop. No call-number was available. A warning? Of what? Having someone play “Happy Birthday” down the line to me – in the dead of night – is certainly one of the nuttiest things that has ever happened to me, but it was hardly something guaranteed to keep me wide awake for the rest of the night. I guessed the message had to be for me, but it was so obscure there was little I could do except make a few notes and save them for posterity. Then, I headed back to bed and slept fine.

For the record, near-identical situations have happened to me on a handful of occasions. Again, it was in the middle of the night. I was woken up, and there was a voice on the phone. This time, it was the sound of one of those battery-powered laughing bags. That’s what can happen when you get into Ufology: you’re exposed to loonies, M.I.B. and spies (and which are, sometimes, one and the very same) with too much time on their hands.

We have long looked out into the sky and wondered what lies out there. It seems that ever since the first flickers of consciousness swirled within our brains we have looked up at the heavens and wondered at what lies out there and what our place is. On our long road to understanding of the universe we live in, there have been many strides and missteps. Science has tried to pave the way forward over the horizon of the unknown, and sometimes it gets it very right, and sometimes it gets things so very, very wrong. Here we will look at a rather entertaining look at the latter.

Reverend Thomas Dick was born in November of 1774, and was a British church minister, science teacher and writer who had a deep and intense interest in astronomy from a young age. It all began when he saw a meteor streak across the sky when he was 9 years old, and before long he was devising his own telescope fashioned from some modified spectacle lenses and pasteboard tubes. He would pursue this passion into adulthood, and although his career as a preacher derailed a bit when he was excommunicated for having an affair with his servant, he nevertheless still managed to churn out quite a few scientific, philosophical, and religious works that were well received both in England and America and would go on to influence countless scientists, engineers, politicians, writers and thinkers. Yet for all of his respected work, some things really stand out as very odd in this day and age.

Thomas Dick

Between stints at writing, preaching, and scientific research, Dick became more and more obsessed with the idea that we are not alone in the universe. He was what is called a “natural theologist,” meaning that he believed that God’s signs pervaded nature and the cosmos, and that if He had deemed it worthy to create life here, then He had probably done it elsewhere as well. He came to strongly believe in the concept of the plurality of worlds, or cosmic pluralism, that every planet in the Solar System was inhabited and that God would not have created a universe that consisted of merely barren expanses and lifeless rocks. Dick believed that God would want the grandeur of His creation to be witnessed as widely as possible, and so he came to believe that all of the planets of the solar system must therefore be inhabited. He would say of this in his book Celestial Scenery:

This is a conclusion which is not merely probable, but absolutely certain, for the opposite opinion would rob the Deity of the most distinguishing attribute of his nature, by virtually denying him the perfection of infinite wisdom and intelligence. But we have no reason to conclude that they are exactly similar to us. Schemes far more foolish and preposterous than the above have been contrived and acted upon in every age of the world.

The idea of alien life in our solar system in and of itself wasn’t a new idea, and indeed the astronomer William Herschel had been talking about it since way back, but Dick was one of the first to actually try to make a census of just how many aliens there were. He was so sure that the rest of the solar system was inhabited that he went about trying to calculate exactly how many aliens there were populating each planet in our neighborhood, ultimately falling back on the now questionable method of using the surface area of each planet and the population density of England. In those days there were an average of 280 people per square mile in England, so crunching the numbers gave Dick an idea of how many extraterrestrials there were on each celestial object, and his predictions are wild, to say the least.

According to Dick, based on his calculations, there were 50 billion creatures living on Venus, seven trillion on Jupiter, 15 billion Martians on Mars, eight trillion living on Saturn, and even 4.2 billion on the moon and the asteroid Vesta holding around 64 million inhabitants according to him. Dick even theorized that Saturn’s rings were inhabited, and surmised that there were no fewer than 21 trillion inhabitants of the solar system, possibly even more if the sun was also inhabited, which he believed it was, even theorizing that it could support an additional 31 times as many creatures. Indeed, Dick believed that although these alien creatures would similar to us in size and habits of living, God had provided each planet with organisms capable of adapting to live in their own respective habitats, even the sun, which was pretty revelatory since this was just before Charles Darwin would come out with his theories on evolution. He would say:

We need not imagine there will be any great difficulty in ascending such lofty eminences; for the inhabitants of such worlds may be furnished with bodies different from those of the human race, and endowed with locomotive powers far superior to ours.

Dick would die in 1857 at the age of 82 without meeting a single one of these 22 trillion galactic neighbors, and to this day we haven’t met any of them either. It all seems pretty silly to us now, but back in the day Dick was so respected as a scientist that it didn’t all seem totally absurd. Looking back at it all now, it seems to be a rather charming, if misguided foray into gathering an understanding of our solar system, and although we can laugh now, it all goes to show the stumbling blocks we have had when venturing out into the vast unknown above our heads, and how much we don’t know even now.