Scientists examining evidence across the world from New Jersey to North Africa say they have linked the abrupt disappearance of half of earth's species 200 million years ago to a precisely dated set of gigantic volcanic eruptions. The eruptions may have caused climate changes so sudden that many creatures were unable to adapt -- possibly on a pace similar to that of human-influenced climate warming today. The extinction opened the way for dinosaurs to evolve and dominate the planet for the next 135 million years, before they, too, were wiped out in a later planetary cataclysm.

In recent years, many scientists have suggested that the so-called End-Triassic Extinction and at least four other known past die-offs were caused at least in part by mega-volcanism and resulting climate change. However, they were unable to tie deposits left by eruptions to biological crashes closely in time. This study provides the tightest link yet, with a newly precise date for the ETE--201,564,000 years ago, exactly the same time as a massive outpouring of lava. "This may not quench all the questions about the exact mechanism of the extinction itself. However, the coincidence in time with the volcanism is pretty much ironclad," said coauthor Paul Olsen, a geologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who has been investigating the boundary since the 1970s.

The new study unites several pre-existing lines of evidence by aligning them with new techniques for dating rocks. Lead author Terrence Blackburn (then at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; now at the Carnegie Institution) used the decay of uranium isotopes to pull exact dates from basalt, a rock left by eruptions. The basalts analyzed in the study all came from the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province (CAMP), a series of huge eruptions known to have started around 200 million years ago, when nearly all land was massed into one huge continent. The eruptions spewed some 2.5 million cubic miles of lava in four sudden spurts over a 600,000-year span, and initiated a rift that evolved into the Atlantic Ocean; remnants of CAMP lavas are found now in North and South America, and North Africa. The scientists analyzed samples from what are now Nova Scotia, Morocco and the New York City suburbs. (Olsen hammered one from a road cut in the Hudson River Palisades, about 1,900 feet from the New Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge.)

Previous studies have suggested a link between the CAMP eruptions and the extinction, but other researchers' dating of the basalts had a margin of error of 1 to 3 million years. The new margin of error is only a few thousand years -- in geology, an eye blink. Blackburn and his colleagues showed that the eruption in Morocco was the earliest, with ones in Nova Scotia and New Jersey coming about 3,000 and 13,000 years later, respectively. Sediments below that time contain pollen, spores and other fossils characteristic of the Triassic era; in those above, the fossils disappear. Among the creatures that vanished were eel-like fish called conodonts, early crocodilians, tree lizards and many broad-leaved plants. The dating is further strengthened by a layer of sediment just preceding the extinction containing mineral grains providing evidence of one of earth's many periodic reversals of magnetic polarity. This particular reversal, labeled E23r, is consistently located just below the boundary, making it a convenient marker, said coauthor Dennis Kent, a paleomagnetism expert who is also at Lamont-Doherty. With the same layers found everywhere the researchers have looked so far, the eruptions "had to be a hell of an event," said Kent.

The third piece of chronological evidence is the sedimentary layers themselves. Sedimentary rocks cannot be dated directly -- one reason why the timing of the extinction has been hard to nail. Olsen and some others have long contended that Earth's precession -- a cyclic change in the orientation of the axis toward the sun and resulting temperature changes -- consistently created layers reflecting the alternate filling and drying of large lake basins on a fairly steady 20,000-year schedule. This idea is well accepted for more recent time, but many scientists have had doubts about whether it could be applied much farther back. By correlating the precisely dated basalts with surrounding sedimentary layers, the new study shows that precession operated pretty much the same way then, allowing dates with a give or take of 20,000 years to be assigned to most sediments holding fossils, said Olsen.

Olsen has painstakingly cataloged the layers around the time of the End Triassic, and the initial phase of the extinction occurs in just one layer -- meaning the event took 20,000 years at most. But, he said, "it could have taken much less. This is the level of resolution we have now, but it's the 'less' part that is the more important, and that's what we are working on now."

Many scientists assume that giant eruptions would have sent sulfurous particles into the air that darkened the skies, creating a multi-year winter that would have frozen out many creatures. A previous study by Kent and Rutgers University geochemist Morgan Schaller has also shown that each pulse of volcanism doubled the air's concentration of carbon dioxide -- a major component of volcanic gases. Following the cold pulses, the warming effects of this greenhouse gas would have lasted for millennia, wiping out creatures that could not take too much heat. (It was already quite hot to begin with at that time; even pre-eruption CO2 levels were higher than those of today.) Fossils show that heat-sensitive plants especially suffered; there is also evidence that the increased CO2 caused chemical reactions that made the oceans more acidic, causing populations of shell-building creatures to collapse. As if this were not enough, there is also some evidence that a large meteorite hit Earth at the time of the extinction--but that factor seems far less certain. A much stronger case has been made for the extinction of the dinosaurs by a meteorite some 65 million years ago -- an event that opened the way for the evolution and dominance of mammals, including human beings. Volcanism may have been involved in that extinction as well, with the meteorite delivering the final blow.)

The End Triassic was the fourth known global die-off; the extinction of the dinosaurs was the fifth. Today, some scientists have proposed that we are on the cusp of a sixth, humanmade, extinction. Explosive human population growth, industrial activity and exploitation of natural resources are rapidly pushing many species off the map. Burning of fossil fuels in particular has had an effect, raising the air's CO2 level more than 40 percent in just 200 years -- a pace possibly as fast, or faster, than that of the End Triassic. Resulting temperatures increases now appear to be altering ecosystems; and CO2 entering seawater is causing what could be the fastest ongoing acidification of the oceans for at least the last 300 million years, according to a 2012 study. "In some ways, the End Triassic Extinction is analogous to today," said Blackburn. "It may have operated on a similar time scale. Much insight on the possible future impact of doubling atmospheric CO2 on global temperatures, ocean acidity and life on earth may be gained by studying the geologic record."

Paul Renne, a researcher at the Berkeley Geochronology Center in California, who studies the End Triassic but was not involved in the Science paper, said the study was "part of a growing pattern in which we see that the major ecosystem crises were triggered" by volcanism. He said the new data "make the case stronger than it was. … The pendulum continues to swing in favor of that idea." Of the actual mechanism that killed creatures, he said climate change was the most popular suspect. But, he added, "We still don't have any way yet of knowing exactly how much CO2 was put into the atmosphere at that time, and what it did. If we did, we would then be able to say to people, 'Look folks, this is what we're facing now, and here's what we have to do about it. But we don't know that yet."

Source: Science Daily
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130321141450.htm

Want to know what's going to happen to animals in the next century? Then you must read science journalist Emily Anthes' new book Frankenstein's Cat, about how the animals of tomorrow will be transformed by high tech implants and genetic engineering. We've got an amazing excerpt from the book -- about how the CIA tried to create cyborg cat spies.

"Robo Revolution," an excerpt from Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts, by Emily Anthes

In the 1960s, the Central Intelligence Agency recruited an unusual field agent: a cat. In an hour-long procedure, a veterinary surgeon transformed the furry feline into an elite spy, implanting a microphone in her ear canal and a small radio transmitter at the base of her skull, and weaving a thin wire antenna into her long gray-and-white fur. This was Operation Acoustic Kitty, a top-secret plan to turn a cat into a living, walking surveillance machine. The leaders of the project hoped that by training the feline to go sit near foreign officials, they could eavesdrop on private conversations.

The problem was that cats are not especially trainable—they don’t have the same deep-seated desire to please a human master that dogs do—and the agency’s robo-cat didn’t seem terribly interested in national security. For its first official test, CIA staffers drove

Acoustic Kitty to the park and tasked it with capturing the conversation of two men sitting on a bench. Instead, the cat wandered into the street, where it was promptly squashed by a taxi. The program was abandoned; as a heavily redacted CIA memo from the time delicately phrased it, “Our final examination of trained cats . . . convinced us that the program would not lend itself in a practical sense to our highly specialized needs.” (Those specialized needs, one assumes, include a decidedly unflattened feline.)

Operation Acoustic Kitty, misadventure though it was, was a visionary idea just fifty years before its time. Today, once again, the U.S. government is looking to animal- machine hybrids to safeguard the country and its citizens. In 2006, for example, DARPA zeroed

in on insects, asking the nation’s scientists to submit “innovative proposals to develop technology to create insect-cyborgs.”

It was not your everyday government request, but it was an utterly serious one. For years, the U.S. military has been hoping to develop “micro air vehicles”—ultrasmall flying robots capable of performing surveillance in dangerous territory. Building these machines is not easy. The dynamics of flight change at very small sizes, and the vehicles need to be lightweight enough to fly, yet strong enough to carry cameras and other equipment. Most formidably, they need a source of power, and batteries light enough for microfliers just don’t have enough juice to keep the craft s aloft for very long. Consider two of the tiny, completely synthetic drones that engineers have managed to create: The Nano Hummingbird, a flying robot modeled after the bird, with a 6.5- inch wingspan, maxes out at an eleven-minute flight, while the DelFly Micro, which measures less than four inches from wingtip to wingtip, can stay airborne for just three minutes.

DARPA officials knew there had to be something better out there. “Proof-of-existence of small-scale flying machines . . . is abundant in nature in the form of insects,” Amit Lal, a DARPA program manager and Cornell engineer, wrote in a pamphlet the agency issued to the prospective researchers. So far, nature’s creations far outshine our own. Insects are aerodynamic, engineered for flight, and naturally skilled at maneuvering around obstacles. And they can power themselves; a common fly can cruise the skies for hours at a time. So perhaps, DARPA officials realized, the military didn’t need to start from scratch; if they began with live insects, they’d already be halfway to their dream flying machines. All they’d have to do was figure out how to hack into insects’ bodies and control their movements. If scientists could manage to do that, the DARPA pamphlet said, “it might be possible to transform [insects] into predictable devices that can be used for . . . missions requiring unobtrusive entry into areas inaccessible or hostile to humans.”

DARPA’s call essentially launched a grand science fair, one designed to encourage innovation and tap into the competitive spirit of scientists around the country. The agency invited researchers to submit proposals outlining how they’d create steerable insect cyborgs and promised to fund the most promising projects. What the agency wanted was a remote- controlled bug that could be steered to within five meters of a target. Ultimately, the insects would also need to carry surveillance equipment, such as microphones, cameras, or gas sensors, and to transmit whatever data they collected back to military officials. The pamphlet outlined one specific application for the robo-bugs—outfitted with chemical sensors, they could be used to detect traces of explosives in remote buildings or caves—and it’s easy to imagine other possible tasks for such cyborgs. Insect drones kitted out with video cameras could reveal whether a building is occupied and whether those inside are civilians or enemy combatants, while those with microphones could record sensitive conversations, becoming bugs that literally bugged you.

As far-fetched and improbable as DARPA’s dream of steerable robo-bugs sounds, a host of recent scientific breakthroughs means it’s likely to be far more successful than Acoustic Kitty was. The same advances that enabled the development of modern wildlife- tracking devices—the simultaneous decrease in size and increase in power of microprocessors, receivers, and batteries—are making it possible to create true animal cyborgs. By implanting these micromachines into animals’ bodies and brains, we can seize control of their movements and behaviors. Genetics provides new options, too, with scientists engineering animals whose nervous systems are easy to manipulate. Together, these and other developments mean that we can make tiny flying cyborgs—and a whole lot more. Engineers, geneticists, and neuroscientists are controlling animal minds in different ways and for different reasons, and their tools and techniques are becoming cheaper and easier for even us nonexperts to use. Before long, we may all be able to hijack animal bodies. The only question is whether we’ll want to.

DARPA’s call for insect cyborgs piqued the interest of Michel Maharbiz, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley. He was excited by the challenge of creating flying machines that merged living bodies and brains with electronic bits and bytes.

“What I wanted at the end of the day was a remote-controlled airplane,” Maharbiz recalls. “What was the closest thing to a remote-controlled airplane that I could get with these beetles?”

Maharbiz was an expert at making small electronic devices but an amateur when it came to entomology. So he started reading up. He figured that most scientists taking on DARPA’s challenge would work with flies or moths, longtime laboratory superstars, but Maharbiz came to believe that beetles were a better bet. Compared with flies and moths, beetles are sturdy animals, encased in hard shells, and many species are large enough to carry significant cargo. The downside: Scientists didn’t know much about the specific nerve pathways and brain circuits involved in beetle flight.

That meant that the first challenge was to unravel the insects’ biology. Maharbiz and his team began working with several different beetle species and eventually settled on Mecynorrhina torquata, or the flower beetle. It is a scary- looking bug—more than two inches long, with fearsome claws and a rhinoceros-like horn on the forehead. Through trial and error, the scientists homed in on a promising region of the beetle brain nestled at the base of the optic lobes. Previous research had shown that neural activity in this area helped keep the insect’s wings oscillating, and Maharbiz’s team discovered that when they stimulated this part of the brain in just the right way, they could start and stop beetle flight. When they sent a series of rapid electrical signals to the region, the beetle started flapping its wings and readied itself for takeoff. Sending a single long pulse to the same area prompted the insect to immediately still its wings. The effect was so dramatic that a beetle in mid-flight would simply fall out of the air.

After he discovered these tricks, Maharbiz was ready to try building the full flying machine. The flower beetle’s transformation began with a quick trip to the freezer. In the icy air, the beetle’s body temperature dropped, immobilizing and anesthetizing the insect. Then Maharbiz and his students removed the bug from the icebox and readied their instruments. They poked a needle through the beetle’s exoskeleton, making small holes directly over the brain and the base of the optic lobes, and threaded a thin steel wire into each hole.

They made another set of holes over the basalar muscles, which modulate wing thrust and are located on either side of the beetle’s body. The researchers pushed a wire into the right basalar muscle. Stimulating it would cause the beetle’s right wing to start beating with more power, making the insect veer left. They put another wire into the left basalar muscle; they would use it to steer the beetle to the right. The loose ends of all these wires snaked out of their respective holes and plugged into a package of electronics mounted with beeswax on the beetle’s back. This “backpack” included all the equipment Maharbiz needed to wirelessly send signals to the beetle’s brain: a miniature radio receiver, a custom- built circuit board, and a battery.

Then it was time for a test flight. One of Maharbiz’s students called up their custom- designed “Beetle Commander” software on a laptop. He issued the signal. The antennae jutting out of the beetle’s backpack received the message and passed it along to the circuit board, which sent electricity surging down the wire and into the beetle’s optic lobe. The insect’s wings began to flap. The empty white room the researchers used as an airfield filled wiTha buzzing sound, and the bug took flight. The beetle flew on its own— it didn’t need any further direction from human operators to stay airborne—but as it cruised across the room, the researchers overlaid their own commands. They pinged the basalar muscles, prompting the beetle to weave back and forth through the room, as if flying through an invisible maze. It wouldn’t have looked out of place going up against a stunt pilot at an air show. Another jolt of electricity to the optic lobe, and the beetle dropped out of the air and skittered across the tile floor.

As soon as Maharbiz presented his work, the news stories came fast and furious, with pronouncements such as “The creation of a cyborg insect army has just taken a step closer to reality,” “Spies may soon be bugging conversations using actual insects, thanks to research funded by the US military,” and more. A columnist speculated about the possibility of a swarm of locust drones being used as vehicles for launching deadly germs. There was chatter about beetles that had been “zombified,” and references to “the impending robots vs. humans war.”

When Maharbiz reflects upon this media frenzy, he admits that the immense public interest in his work doesn’t surprise him. The research, after all, is practically primed to light up the futuristic fantasy centers of our brains. Insects, even without modifications, seem like weird, alien organisms to many of us. As Maharbiz explains, “Insects have inherently some sort of strange, science fiction quality that a bunny doesn’t have.” Add in miniature electronics, flying devices, animal- machine hybrids, and covert military operations, and you have a recipe for dystopian daydreaming.

But Maharbiz bristles at the most sinister suggestions, at the media coverage that suggests his beetles are the product of, as he puts it, “some evil government conspiracy.” As for the possibility that the U.S. government is planning to use the bugs to build a killer insect army or to spy on its own citizens? “I think that’s nonsense,” he says. His beetles haven’t been sent out into the field yet—they still need some refinement before they’re ready for deployment—but if and when they are, Maharbiz says he expects his bugs to be used abroad, in routine military operations. (Of course, some people may find that “equally reprehensible,” he acknowledges.) There are civilian applications, too. Imagine, Maharbiz tells me, an army of beetle- bots, steered to the scene of an earthquake. The bugs could be outfitted with temperature sensors, guided through rubble, and programmed to send messages back to search teams if they detect any objects that are close to human body temperature; rescuers would then know exactly where to search for survivors.

Whatever the application, future insect commanders will have options that go beyond beetles. Maharbiz is working on a remote-controlled fly, which he anticipates being especially difficult to build. “The fly is so small and the muscles are so packed and everything’s so tiny,” he says, that even just implanting the electronics will be challenging. A Chinese research team has managed to start and stop flight in honeybees, and Amit Lal, the engineer who led the DARPA program, has created steerable cyborg moths.

One of Lal’s innovations has been figuring out how to take advantage of morphogenesis, the process by which many species of ate on a pupa than an adult insect. The procedure is so simple that it could enable the “mass production of these hybrid insect- machine systems,” the scientists wrote.

Still, the robo-bugs aren’t quite ready for their tour of duty. Our directional control is still pretty crude. Ultimately, we’ll want to do more than make an insect simply veer left . We’ll want to be able to command it to turn, say, precisely 35 degrees to the left or navigate a complicated three-dimensional space, such as a chimney or pipe. There’s also the matter of the surveillance equipment. So far, the main focus has been on building insects that we can steer, but for these cyborgs to be useful, we’ll need to outfit them with various sensors and make sure that they can successfully collect and transmit environmental information. And though the cyborg insects power their own flight—something that completely robotic fliers cannot do—the surveillance equipment will need to get its electricity from somewhere.

One intriguing possibility is to use the insect’s own wings as a source of power. In 2011, a team of researchers from the University of Michigan announced that they had accomplished just that by building miniature generators out of ceramic and brass. Each tiny generator was a flattened spiral—imagine the head of a thumbtack, if it were shaped from a tight coil of metal rather than a single flat sheet—measuring 0.2 inches across. When they were mounted on the beetle’s thorax, these generators transformed the insect’s wing vibrations into electrical energy. With some refinement, the researchers note, these energy- harvesting devices could be used to power the equipment toted around by cyborg bugs.

Insects could give us a cyborg-animal air force, zooming around the skies and searching for signs of danger. But for terrestrial missions, for our cyborg- animal army, we’d have to look elsewhere. We’d have to look to a lab at the State University of New York (SUNY) Downstate, where researchers have built a remote- controlled rat.

We’ve been rooting around in rat brains for ages; neuroscientists oft en send electrical signals directly into rodents’ skulls to elicit certain reactions and behaviors. Usually, however, this work requires hooking a rodent up to a system of cables, severely restricting its movement. When the SUNY team, led by the neuroscientist John Chapin, began their work more than a de cade ago, they wanted to create something different—a method for delivering these electrical pulses wirelessly. They hoped that such a system would free researchers (and rats) from a cumbersome experimental setup, and enable all sorts of new scientific feats. A wireless system would allow scientists to manipulate a rat’s movements and behaviors while it was roaming freely and give us a robo-rodent suitable for all sorts of special operations. Rats have an excellent sense of smell, so cyborg rats could be trained to detect the scent of explosives, for instance, and then steered to a field suspected to contain land mines. (The task would pose no danger to the animals, which are too light to set off mines.) Or they could be directed into collapsed buildings and tasked with sniffing out humans trapped beneath the rubble, performing a job similar to the one Maharbiz imagines for his cyborg insects. “They could fit through crawl spaces that a bloodhound never could,” says Linda Hermer-Vazquez, a neuroscientist who was part of the SUNY team at the time.

But before any of that could happen, the SUNY scientists had to figure out how to build this kind of robo-rat. They began by opening up a rat’s skull and implanting steel wires in its brain. The wires ran from the brain out through a large hole in the skull, and into a backpack harnessed to the rodent. (“Backpack” seems to be a favorite euphemism among the cyborg- animal crowd.) This rat pack, as it were, contained a suite of electronics, including a microprocessor and a receiver capable of picking up distant signals. Chapin or one of his colleagues could sit five hundred yards away from the rat and use a laptop to transmit a message to the receiver, which relayed the signal to the microprocessor, which sent an electric charge down the wires and into the rat’s brain.

To direct the animal’s movements, the scientists implanted electrodes in the somatosensory cortex, the brain region that processes touch sensations. Zapping one area of the cortex made the rat feel as though the left side of its face was being touched. Stimulating a different part of the cortex produced the same phantom feeling on the right side of the rat’s face. The goal was to teach the rodent to turn in the opposite direction of the sensation. (Though that seems counterintuitive, it actually works with the rat’s natural instincts. To a rodent, a sensation on the right side of the face indicates the presence of an obstacle and prompts the animal to scurry away from it.)

During the training process, the SUNY scientists used an unconventional system of reinforcement. When the rat turned in the correct direction, the researchers used a third wire to send an electrical pulse into what’s known as the medial forebrain bundle (MFB), a region of the brain involved in processing plea sure. Studies in humans and other animals have shown that direct activation of the MFB just plain feels good. (When the scientists gave the rats the chance to stimulate their own MFBs by pressing down on a lever, the animals did so furiously—hitting the lever as many as two hundred times in twenty minutes.) So sending a jolt of electricity zinging down to a rat’s MFB acted as a virtual reward for good behavior. Over the course of ten sessions, the robo-rats learned to respond to the cues and rewards being piped into their brains. Scientists managed to direct the rodents through a challenging obstacle course, coaxing them to climb a ladder, traverse a narrow plank, scramble down a flight of stairs, squirm through a hoop, and then navigate their way down a steep ramp.

As a final demonstration, the researchers simulated the kind of search- and- rescue task a robo-rat might be asked to perform in the real world. They rubbed tissues against their forearms and taught the rodents to identify this human odor. They constructed a small Plexiglas arena, filled it with a thick layer of sawdust, and buried human- scented tissues inside. When they released the robo-rats into the arena, the animals tracked down the tissues in less than a minute. The scientists also discovered that the rats that received MFB rewards found the target odors faster and dug for them more energetically than rodents that had been trained with conventional food rewards. As Hermer-Vazquez recalls: “The robo-rats were incredibly motivated and very accurate.”

Source: io9
http://io9.com/the-cias-secret-experiments-to-turn-cats-into-spies-453478752

---

The monks began to chant and burn incense while they scrutinized Magocsi. He fell asleep, and when he awakened he saw the head monk, an old man, seated opposite him.

“And as I was looking at him,” Magocsi said, “he was rising up from his chair – levitating. Then the whole area just opened up so that I could see the whole valley and the saucer hovering nearby, with its orange glow.”

AROUND THE WORLD IN 23 HOURS

Magocsi next recalled that he was standing with the head monk again on a balcony or terrace in extreme cold. After this dreamlike moment, he was escorted back to the saucer, which lifted up and flew him this time to South America, where it seemed someone was shooting green lightning bolts at the ship. From there, the next destination was Northern California, specifically a place Magocsi thought must have been Mount Shasta. He could see three campfires below him, with men seated around the campfires, soon after which the ship discharged some form of energy into the mountain’s peak. Mount Shasta has for centuries been known as the scene of many a UFO sighting and numerous other paranormal events, so it is a fitting place for Magocsi to end his trip around the world onboard a flying saucer.

After leaving Mount Shasta, Magocsi was returned to the same spot where he was originally picked up.

“The entire experience lasted 23 hours,” he said. “Insofar as being tired from the trip is concerned, I was. And insofar as the food, I found a cubicle which I managed to open and found storage-cubes, condensed food. And I found water. That was my first trip. I was happy after that. So, a few days later, the saucer comes again to the same spot and lands, and I got into it and went on another trip.”

This time, the trip would not be a journey around the physical planet as know it. Magocsi called this second trip an “inter-dimensional” one, though he was still required to put on a silvery “spacesuit,” similar to a skin diver’s outfit, with a wide belt and something resembling a motorcycle helmet. The ship hovered for a short time over Lake Ontario then suddenly Magocsi was in deep space, which he also felt was in another parallel dimension. He still had not met anyone onboard the craft.

He recalled being told by someone he had met at the Psychic Fair the previous winter that, “They are from another dimension altogether. They accidentally stumbled onto ours, and there are quite a number of other dimensions that are interconnected.” The person at the fair claimed to be a “psychician” and a member of the Psychician Federation of Worlds.

After fading back into Earth’s dimension, the ship entered a vortex and came to a place where a mother ship sat waiting with seven smaller ships nearby, which Magocsi called “baby ships.” A door opened and he walked out into an idyllic scene similar to a rock garden or pleasant jungle area, a space intended for recreation. He surmised that there were other people there who had also been brought by one of the other smaller ships, and that they were supposed to “seek each other out.”

Magocsi found himself on a planet called Argona, a member of the Psychician Federation of Worlds. He came to a reception area where he met human-looking people, including the cab driver who had taken him to the Psychic Fair instead of to the movies, as Magocsi had intended. The cab driver became Magocsi’s host, taking him on a tour of the city and the surrounding countryside.      

 The city was built inside a domed area and had structures similar to earthly skyscrapers. The entire planet was a recreation center and was populated by thousands of people of varying skin colors and wearing different style clothes. Some of them facially resembled a cat or dog and spoke a language similar to a Chinese kind of singsong.

People from various dimensions were there on a common mission: to be trained in Earth mannerisms, languages and cultures so they could go to Earth and carry out some purpose that required them to pass for normal human beings.

“They had common names like George or Joe,” Magocsi said, “and were said to be from Japan or China. One woman said she was from New York City, but in reality she had never even been to Earth before. Before she was set to come to Earth, she knew already all the mannerisms, even played the piano.

“It’s not very likely that any of these people would ever be detected,” he continued, “except by psychic means. But they looked much nicer, more handsome than we are. They looked more intelligent. There were subtle things about them. Small things. It’s very likely that this girl I met there, who knew New York – she called herself Melody – she could be here right now. She was a gorgeous looking redhead. And she sings.”

THEIR REASON FOR BEING HERE

Magocsi said the influx of human-looking aliens is intended to help us overcome the psychic contamination of our atmosphere, a contamination that could lead to nuclear war and the complete destruction of life on Earth.

“It seems they are greatly concerned,” he said. “They wouldn’t stop us from wiping ourselves out. That’s a no-no. If we want to blow ourselves up, that’s fine. But should that happen, they are willing to rescue quite a few people from here. Selections will be done through aura. They have aura detectors. They’re interested in what kind of an attitude you have socially, spiritually, psychically.”

The lucky chosen ones would be taken on “space arks” to an artificial planet already prepared to house the survivors. Magocsi has no idea how many would be saved, but that an effort to educate some portion of the world to the situation has been underway for a long time. He feels he was chosen by the aliens because they were seeking an “Average Joe,” a typical human specimen, in order to test how he feels about things, how he reacts to various situations.

After undergoing intensive testing on Argona, Magocsi concluded that the aliens are advanced millions of years beyond Earthlings and that we will never catch up with their level of development. He was told that open contact would have to be made at some point in order to foil the evil designs of more negative beings from other parts of the universe that could dupe mankind and use us as a weapon against the friendlier races.

Magocsi believes these negative beings are manifested on Earth as the Men-In-Black, creatures he has encountered himself.

“Once I found a note,” he said. “It was a cutout from a newspaper about someone who published a book on UFOs and who disappeared. I found this cutout in my locked car – on the inside. I don’t know how the hell they got in to put it there, but I feel that was a hint. But I wouldn’t let myself worry about that.”

Meanwhile, the friendly creatures Magocsi met on his journey are governed by higher beings that aren’t flesh and blood but consist of energy and are spiritual in nature. When he asked about the existence of God, he was told that was a mystery that no one could answer because the cosmos is so vast. “Everyone has to find their own answer,” the aliens said. The experiences changed him, Magocsi said, making him more psychically aware and causing him to realize there is more to life than eating, sleeping and making merry.  

He related a conversation he had had with some spiritualists who maintained that their source of inspiration was the spirit of someone’s deceased grandmother. When Magocsi demonstrated his own psychic abilities, they asked where his information was coming from.

“I said, ‘I haven’t got any bloody proof. But it’s not important. I just pick these things up.’”

An amazing story? Indeed!

  But just because he published it in his work “The Authentic Book Of Ultra-Terrestrial Contact,” author Timothy Green Beckley says he doesn’t necessarily have to take Oscar’s account at face value. “It’s really one of the more elaborate contactee stories of recent vintage, but there is little we can do in lieu of a follow-up since Oscar passed away some time ago.”

Beckley says it sounds more like an out-of-body experience than an actual, physical trip onboard a flying saucer.

“I met the man face to face,” Beckley says, “and I can see no reason why he would have made up the whole thing as he never received any sort of financial gain or much in the way of notoriety either. He still has a following in some parts of the world, people who believe in him and want to keep his story alive.”


If you enjoyed this article, visit Sean Casteel’s “UFO Journalist” website at www.seancasteel.com

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