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In This Fantastic Issue:
Mental Armageddon: The Quest for Mind Control
Radionics: Mind Machines for Better Health
Mark David Chapman: Lone Nut or CIA Assassin?
America and Bio-Weapons: A Troubling Ethos
The Healing Sounds of Jonathan Goldman
And so much more, including book, music, and movie reviews, exhibit  listings, your fall horoscope, and conference listings!

Culture of Contact Episode 4: Does Jeremy Vaeni have a deep dark secret similar to certain public stall lovin' politicians? We find out. Then, Timothy "Mr. UFO" Beckley joins for a winding, free-for-all of a conversation that is sure to get your mind racing!  All that and the prerequisite MORE! on this, the 4th edition of Culture of Contact!

Many Uncrazy Clevelanders Have Seen Strange Lights In The Sky. Who - Or What - Is Buzzing Northeast Ohio?

To suggest that Northeast Ohio could be witness to the next mass UFO sighting does not officially make you a member of the tin-foil hat crowd. If you believe even just a few of the witnesses, Cleveland and its surrounding communities might already be a hotspot.

During the previous two years, the Cleveland UFOlogy Project, considered the oldest of its kind on this side of the globe, has documented 20 credible sightings. The 2005 documentary Dan Akroyd: Unplugged on UFOs highlighted the peculiar lights over Lake Erie near Eastlake, where witnesses reported their latest sighting just this past June. Earlier this year, an "orb" was videotaped over the Key Bank Tower during a peace rally, and the incident made it on the CBS nightly news.

The hype continues: Literally hundreds of thousands have downloaded Internet videos of Northeast Ohio UFOs. The Cleveland Office of Homeland Security has investigated. And one of the Eastlake UFO witnesses says he's signed a contract with a History Channel for a documentary.

"If you take all of the people in Ohio who are interested in this subject, I bet half of them are from that part of the state," says Central Ohio-based William E. Jones, state director for Ohio MUFON, or Mutual UFO Network. "A lot of folks up there have seen things over the years. More people are interested up there. I don't know why."

Sam Phillips has long been a fixture of Cleveland's music scene. He's an accomplished drummer and "hand snapper," and appeared on The Arsenio Hall Show. When interviewed for this story, however, he was homeless and sleeping at the homes of friends and family. Phillips taped a strange light spinning and hovering over the Key Bank Tower on March 10, during a peace rally.

"This is not about me," says Phillips, who admits he has become obsessed with what he saw that night. "There's a pattern here. There's a riddle here. And I want answers. I want an explanation."

He believes it wasn't coincidence the sighting took place over a peace rally. During the sighting, he recalls saying that our "brothers and sisters are going to come down from the universe and humble our ass."

Phillips' story, however, is but a sidebar in the current wave of Northeast Ohio UFO mania. Taking center stage is Lake Erie, and Michael Lee Hill of Eastlake.

Hill, like Phillips, is a musician. In 2001, Grammy-award winner and guitar legend Steve Vai picked Hill as the winner of a national guitar contest. Hill is gregarious, upbeat and likeable. He's unconventional and complex. He's certain that the UFOs he has seen are targeting him.

"I've had contact my whole life," he says. "I remember asking my mother, "Why do Santa's elves keep visiting me?'"

The recent visitations started in earnest five years ago, not far from the coal-burning power plant, he says. While walking on the beach, not far from his home, Hill said he witnessed a top hat-shaped craft hovering and pulsating over the shoreline. This same area is also famous in UFO lore for a 1988 encounter documented by the Coast Guard.

Hill started taking a video camera to the lakefront. Since then he's captured scores of bright lights that appear to hover over Lake Erie. He's uploaded many of his videos to YouTube, and those caught the attention of David Sereda, who directed the Akroyd documentary. Hill created the music for Sereda's latest project, From Here To Andromeda. Hill also says he recently signed a contract for a History Channel project, but the channel did not return Free Times' calls.

"I really do consider myself a spiritual messenger; I know it sounds freaky," says Hill, adding that the UFO filmed over the Key Bank Tower is one of the same orbs he captured over Lake Erie. "There's a huge story unfolding here. I think they're absolutely sending us a message. I believe they are here to help us become a galactic society."

At the other end of the spectrum is Eastlake resident Gary Strauss, who says adamantly, "I'm not one of those UFO people." He's a chemist and a supervisor at a local laboratory. He's lived in his home on the lake since 1984, in the same neighborhood as Hill, though they've never met.

Early on the morning of June 21, Strauss and his son saw four bright lights, shaped like the tip of a Sharpie marker, high above the water. The lights were in a line parallel with the shoreline, positioned at 11 o'clock and 30 degrees above the horizon.

Then one vanished. Then another. Soon all four were gone. Suddenly, they reappeared in the shape of a diamond. Then they went flat again. This went on for more than an hour.

He called the Eastlake police and they dispatched an officer. Strauss remembers the officer saying, "What is that?"

The following day, his son checked the Internet for lights over Lake Erie and found one of Hill's videos. He recalls his son shouting, "That's it! That's what we saw!"

But unlike other Lake Erie witnesses, Strauss doesn't believe the lights are extraterrestrial. He guesses they're the result of government or aerospace industry experiments with new technology. "They're bouncing radar off some type of object," he speculates. "Some form of radar reflection technology. I'm just making an educated guess."

Nevertheless, he's intrigued.

"I look outside a lot more. I want to see it again," says Strauss. "This time, I'm going to have my camera." But he rejects the suggestion that it's anything more than curiosity: "No. I'm not obsessive. Absolutely not."

The Eastlake police actually had two witnesses that night. A detective, who asked not to be named, told the Free Times that he too saw the lights, but from a different vantage point.

The Eastlake police asked the Cleveland office of Homeland Security to look into the sighting, and the detective says he was told later that on the night of the sighting, the Canadian Coast Guard was near the opposite side of the lake searching for a man who had been reported missing. A Canadian Coast Guard helicopter dropped flares, connected to miniature parachutes, over the water. Later it was discovered the man had drowned.

Strauss finds this implausible, believes the lights appeared in a straight line, then vanished, then reappeared in a diamond formation.

The Bush administration reportedly has funneled billions to the aerospace industry to develop space-based weapons under the guise of missile defense. Secret military space-plane programs are believed to have been revived as well.

Another possibility are LAGEOS, or Laser Geodynamics Satellites. Publicly, the government says two are in orbit, and both are roughly the size of a basketball. They are made of brass and partially covered with a retro-reflection material that returns light in the direction it comes from, similar to a road sign.

There's also NASA's Glenn Research Center at the Plum Brook site in Sandusky. The site is home to the world's largest space environment simulation chamber. That chamber will test NASA's new spacecraft, Orion, which will take the US back to the moon. Recent upgrades to the Plum Brook site will also allow it to test "next- generation lunar landers, robotic systems, and military and commercial aircraft," according to NASA's Web site.

"So here I come walking out of the TV station one night in November maybe a decade ago after our early evening newscast," says Ted Henry of New Channel 5. "In perfect formation there were five large objects flying smoothly in my direction. It was stunning.

"What I saw was the undersides of five flat objects flying in exact formation. The front two were enormous, maybe the size of several football fields, and the three trailing were smaller, flying in a slightly irregular pattern."

"What do I think they were? All I can really tell you is what I saw."

Henry has talked about his sighting many times on the air. He puts the experience this way: "One thing is certain, for people who see something in the sky, as I did over Cleveland years ago, it can be a life changing experience."

Source: The Cleveland Free Times
http://www.freetimes.com/stories/15/21/thats-no-moon

The Little Rock Nine, a group that integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in September 1957, observed its anniversary Tuesday even as the protests in Jena, Louisiana underscored continued racial strife in the US . But the plight of the Nine was not the only social oppression that America suffered in 1957--the UFO cover up was in full flower and UFO believers were handily marginalized and even prosecuted. The scientist Wilhelm Reich was thrown in jail in part for exploring human energy potential and therapeutic techniques not approved by the Food and Drug Administration, but also in part because he was using the consequent cloudbuster technology to battle UFOs in the Tucson desert.

Reich had been condemned as a medical quack, his books had been burned and his "life energy" boxes, precursors to a type cannon called a cloudbuster that harnessed atmospheric energy, were destroyed. Reich had harmed no one and, indeed, had helped many with his understanding and manipulation of what he called the orgone. He witnessed several UFOs on his estate in Maine and used the orgone cloudbuster guns to cause them to go away. He did the same on a famous trip to the desert southwest that he documented in his last book, Contact With Space. By his own estimation, he fought the first battle against space intruders, and won. The FDA, of course, never truly followed Reich's scientific protocols on either orgone boxes or cloudbuster guns, and convicted Reich only on technical violation of its injunction to stop distributing orgone boxes.

Authorities threw Reich in a prison cell in Lewisberg , PA from which he did not emerge alive. In memos to the prison chaplain before his death, however, Reich continued to write passionately about the social situation in the US . His note from September 1957 even includes reference to the disturbance at Little Rock Central High School . He emphasized the very psychological and emotional undercurrents he felt were being ignored in the broader social arena of conspiratorial 1950s America , what prevented many from seeing the space ships he saw in abundance:

"I am merely fulfilling my public duties as a U. S. citizen and worker in planetary affairs if I continue to point out where the true danger to our social and personal existence is placed: its is Emotional Poisoning: disruption through sowing distrust throughout our society, doping and drugging of our population, especially our YOUTH; draining us financially through areas [...]race, a camouflage of the true menace, the Emotional Poisoning a la Little Rock racial upheavals; keeping our high placed officials at bay through fear of sexual scandals [Clinton!--kt], railroading efficient men and women into prisons or lunatic asylums through [?] up there environments; subverting justice by whispered little lies & frightening or using judges. Doing all this destruction unnoticed as it were by all those responsible. It was clear from the very beginning that [?] and now lyrics were subverted by such use of stupidities & evasions on our part [rock'n'roll!--kt], especially by the staid reluctance to talk bluntly and take the bull by the horns. The bull is really no more tan a few slimy tape worms eating away at our emotional guts. It is high time to start giving social power to the established functions of Love, Work & Learning as bastions against the tapeworms."

The prison memo form includes this banal and perhaps prescient statement: "Your failure to specifically state your problem may result in no action being taken." Reich's imprisonment was in part the end result of mis-reporting on him that appeared in the New Republic under the editorial leadership of a now-confessed communist spy named Michael Straight in a book entitled, After Long Silence. New Republic made its own pronouncement about Little Rock in its July 7, 1958 edition, complaining about the Supreme Court's failure to stop legal challenges that were slowing down the integration process. The Supreme Court, opined New Republic, "must stand the ground they themselves have assumed, or the grand experiment they inaugurated will end in bitter farce, with consequences for the state of the union that stagger the mind."

Clearly the magazine had a better view of the possible consequences of Supreme Court actions than it did on its own. The consequences of Reich's work with UFOs and otherwise, on the other hand, and the implications of the study of character structure on the understanding of race issues has continued over the years. Writing in a chapter called "Racism and Slavery" in The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Company, 1972), my old friend historian George Rawick notes the impact of "that great underground classic of modern thought, Wilhelm Reich, Character Analysis, 3d ed. rev., first published in German in 1933, and its less well-known but significant companion, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, first published in German in 1933. While I cannot subscribe to all of Reich's system, this chapter could not have been written without his monumental attempt to relate Marx and Freud which loosened the ideological armoring of Western rationalism for me and many others." Although Reich never stated it explicitly, clearly he saw that same armoring as the block that keeps so many from accepting the realities of the UFO issue.


Kenn Thomas' new book, The Conspiracy Files, as well as the new issue of Steamshovel Press, is available through his website, www.steamshovelpress.com

Adrian Shine came to Loch Ness in 1973 to find the monster. Today he protects the highland glen, unravels its natural mysteries and exposes the hoaxes.

The world's foremost expert on the Loch Ness Monster is sitting in a lodge overlooking the fabled highland lake, discussing plans to seek UN World Heritage Site status to protect the area.

Suddenly his eyes flash to the window and a pointing finger shoots out like the hand of God.

"Look -- look out on the loch! That's amazing!" A visiting Canadian journalist jumps to the window, wildly hopeful -- despite himself -- that he will see Nessie cutting through the cold, dark water below.

Instead, the object of excitement is an antique coal-burning steamboat billowing clouds of black smoke as it chugs southward down Loch Ness.

"That's a Clyde Puffer," says Adrian Shine, naturalist, scientist, inventor, explorer, renaissance man and chief guardian of the Loch Ness legacy. "Haven't seen one of those in years."

Shine's eyes sparkle with pleasure at the sight of the rare watercraft. Or perhaps amusement at the naive expectancy and obvious disappointment of the visitor.

Adrian Shine certainly wasn't expecting to see a long-necked water beast cruising down his beloved loch.

Shine's Loch Ness Project group was instrumental in unmasking the most famous image of Nessie -- the so-called "surgeon's photo" seen on the next page -- as a fraud in 1994, 60 years after it seared the spectacle of a prehistoric water monster into the public imagination.

He has been exploring the loch's immensely deep underwater world for the past 34 years. In that time, the young zealot has become the reasoned and skeptical elder statesman, debunker of hoaxes and false hopes, and formulator of rational explanations for the hundreds of eyewitness accounts of Nessie sightings.

But still, there is always the hope of a Nessie eureka.

As Shine says: "I do not believe in the Loch Ness Monster -- yet -- because there isn't enough evidence for it. But 1,000 people like you and me do believe they've seen it."

Shine first came to Loch Ness in 1973, more than a decade after organized, scientific investigation of the Nessie phenomenon had begun. His early efforts were more brave than productive. The first summer, he spent nights rowing around Loch Ness and an even deeper loch, Morar, as he dragged bait and waited to photograph whatever emerged from the black depths. Nothing did.

By the next summer, he was plunging into those murky depths in a homemade submarine built of fibreglass and plate glass in his parents' backyard over the winter. With the help of an amateur crew, Shine made dozens of dives during 1974 and '75 in his one-man submersible. He came close to dying on at least one occasion, but never found the object of his hunt.

Today that submersible is on display at the Loch Ness Centre in Drumnadrochit, where the efforts of Shine and others to uncover the truth underlying the mysteries of the lochs are explained in a stunning multi-media exhibition.

While other Loch Ness investigators fell away, Shine stuck to his quest and slowly became the driving force and chief chronicler of Loch Ness research projects. In the 1980s, that quest shifted from the search for an actual creature to a comprehensive study of the loch environment in which such a creature might exist.

In 1981, Shine and a volunteer crew began sonar exploration of Loch Ness, cruising 24 hours a day in the patrol vessel John Murray as an operator sat glued to the echo sounder.

That culminated in Operation Deepscan in 1987, a massive operation involving dozens of sonar-equipped boats that provided the first complete mapping of the 230-metre-deep loch. Sonar images of several large, moving masses were captured but remain unexplained.

In the 1990s, Shine again engineered new equipment to take deep core samples from the lake bottom, giving researchers a record of sedimentary deposits from Ice Age clay through to nuclear pollution from the Chernobyl disaster.

Today his focus is primarily on the search for historical artifacts on the bottom. So far he and other searchers have found the remains of the Crusader jet boat in which John Cobb died in 1952 while trying to set a water speed record on Loch Ness, as well as a large fishing vessel that sank in the 1920s and a Wellington bomber that ditched in the loch after engine failure during World War II.

"There's all sorts of room out there for strange things," Shine says.

But at the end of the day, there is always Nessie.

"I could make a very good case (for the monster's existence) in court," Shine says. "Unshakable eyewitness testimony is very powerful."

Whether Shine believes or not, others certainly do.

"Absolutely there is a Nessie," local historian and story-teller Ray Owens says. "I've lived here my entire life and never seen it, but I do know two people -- including a police sergeant -- who have. I can't explain it."

Taxi driver Frank Davidson has lived in the area since 1964 and says he has seen two "disturbances" on the loch that he attributes to Nessie.

Shine says most, if not all, of the Nessie sightings can be accounted for by more mundane explanations.

"Conventional science can illuminate the mystery," he says. "For example, there are strong underwater waves in the loch that can move objects against the current."

Some recorded sightings have turned out to be birds, boats, swimming deer, the wake of passing vessels, even sunken logs popping to the surface. And always there is the possibility of giant fish or eels, although Loch Ness probably does not have a sufficient food supply of smaller fish to support a large creature.

Shine's favourite hypothesis for the "strange fish" sightings of the 19th century is that a giant Atlantic sturgeon made it into Loch Ness through the Caledonian Canal. The sturgeon, which can grow to more than three metres long, has a reptilian head that has been described as looking like everything from a crocodile to a horse.

The most recent significant sighting came last May. Gordon Holmes, a lab technician from the University of Bradford near Leeds, videotaped a strong disturbance in the loch, which he believed to be caused by a moving creature. He took the video to the Loch Ness Centre for Shine's assessment.

"I looked through the viewfinder and said it looked like the wake of a large fish," Shine said.

Shine's initial observation helped propel Holmes' footage onto the BBC evening news and the front pages of British newspapers. But further review of the video in better conditions has led Shine to change his opinion: "It showed more like a vertical downdraft (of wind) called a cat's paw."

Shine's Loch Ness quest will always be tied to Nessie.

"We're trying to use the monster story to open up an appreciation of lakes in general and Loch Ness in particular," he says. "It's showing how dynamic a lake is and opening up what you can't see just by looking at the surface."

And maybe one day ...

"There's a big difference between being cynical and skeptical," Shine says. "A cynic can make his living off the monster without ever believing in it. A skeptic will say there isn't enough evidence to prove there's a Loch Ness Monster but there is also no irrefutable proof there couldn't be one."

Source: The Toronto Sun
http://torontosun.com/News/OtherNews/2007/09/24/4521335-sun.html