In a dark, smoke-filled room, somewhere deep in the bowels of an secret government agency, electronic spies quietly monitor all communications throughout the planet. When key words are detected, programs go into action to trace the source and destination of the targeted communication.  And now, red lights are flashing, tapes are spinning, bots are invading social media, secret intelligence operatives are scrambling, and the black helicopters are flying.  All because once again, cyberspace is filled with your number one source of information on conspiracies, UFO, the paranormal, and much more - Conspiracy Journal!

I’ve never tried to conceal the fact that I worked in the adult entertainment industry. No, I wasn’t a porn star though I did have a cameo role in a film shot in San Francisco and starring Candy Samples. Candy was at one time married to soft porn producer Russ – “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” – Meyer. Although Meyer has been deceased for many years, his films are still available with the income going to his estate.

Most notable is the fact that our friend and Sedona, Arizona, UFO abductee – the very talented actress, dancer and artist Raven de la Croix – can be seen strutting her feminine wiles in Russ’s box office hit “Raven,” doubtlessly named after Ms. de la Crois in honor of her charm and beauty. Later on, Raven describes in these pages her sexual encounter and abduction at the hands of the aliens.

At one point back in the mid-1970s I was the movie critic for Hustler Magazine (Larry Flynt was too creepy for my taste) and a couple of years later Editor-in-Chief of Adult Cinema Review. So, whenever an adult film starlet was in town, chances are I would hook up with them to do an interview or attend a screening of their most recent XXX flick. I can’t say a lot of them had UFO experiences, but a few did, and others were mildly interested in the subject enough so that we would hang out at Bernard’s, a bar just off the Minnesota Strip, a section of the Times Square “red light district” that catered to some rather hot-blooded ladies who worked the neighborhood peep shows and topless bars. 42nd Street was kind of raw in those days, and a real draw for out- of-towners – way out- of-towners in our case, I would say.

“Behind the Green Door” star Marilyn Chambers was one of the better known adult film actresses. In fact, she had been at one point an aspiring model whose face graced the box cover of Ivory Snow detergent. She was also a legit singer and a dancer, though she would still shake her booty at some of the Manhattan strip clubs where she would attract a sizeable crowd and make an evening very profitable, both through a cut of the door and tips that her fans lavished upon her (they would throw the fives and tens in a bucket as she paraded around the room).

To say the least, it was all good in the hood – if that was the kind of excitement you were seeking.

I should explain that Chambers was, when I met her, married to a Svengali-type guy by the name of Chuck Traynor, who was previously hitched to “Deep Throat’s” Linda Lovelance. Lovelace claimed that Traynor had forced her into adult films by holding a gun to her head and beating her to have sex with other men. I can’t comment on these allegations. I did have lunch with Traynor, who came off as being the ultimate sleaze, and he was disliked by most adult film industry people (cast and crew). But that has nothing to do with our UFO tale.

I wrote up Marilyn’s UFO encounter for the National Tattler, a weekly tabloid that actually printed a lot of stories on the paranormal and were fairly accurate in their reporting, especially when I was one of their stringers and had a UFO event to tell. They were more likely to take a story than the Enquirer, which had a higher, tougher criterion when it came to accepting freelance articles. Marilyn, as I recall, was stopped at a red light when a UFO parked itself overhead and followed her, keeping pace with her car for a couple of miles. If you can find the account in an old issue of Saga’s UFO Report, which I have since lost, I believe there was an illustration that she did for me of the ship which I can’t find the original of either.

What I promised not to reveal at the time was Marilyn’s sexual abduction experience, which she was afraid of telling for fear it might harm her career. She had released an album of disco music and wanted to go “legit” and thought this might possibly damage her reputation (fat chance!). Don’t make me laugh, but I did keep my promise to keep her experience to myself. But now, since MC passed away many years ago, I can tell all about what transpired to the best of my recollection.

The night of her UFO sighting, which I think might have taken place in Detroit or Chicago – but don’t hold me to that – Marilyn had gone to bed around midnight. There was a storm, she said, brewing outside, but she had kept the window ajar to take in a bit of fresh air. Shortly thereafter, a bright light shone into her bedroom which she initially thought was someone attempting to turn around in the street.

Suddenly, Marilyn says her bed was surrounded by three or four shadowy figures who reached out, beginning to touch and caress her. Chambers admitted to me that since she was in real life easy to excite sexually so she thought perhaps she was simply experiencing a nocturnal orgasm in a dream state. But the hands felt all too real.

“They certainly were not what you would call tender caresses,” she elaborated.

What did the figures and hands look like?

“Well, they were a bit longer and bonier than those of a human,” Marilyn answered, “and they had large heads and a broad torso, but they weren’t monstrous or anything.”

Like many other abductees, Chambers said she was pulled through the wall and found herself inside some sort of tiny compartment somewhere outside of her apartment. She says the beings proceeded to have their way with her.

“I can’t say it wasn’t pleasurable. They invited me to have a drink with them and this settled my nerves and made me more relaxed.”

Unlike some of the abductees who feel they are being used in some form of experimentation, Marilyn did not get that impression.

“They seemed to find it very pleasurable,” she recalled. “I wasn’t forced, but neither was I a completely willing partner!”

Frankly, I can’t recall how or under what circumstances Chambers returned home. It’s as much a blur to me now as it was to her at the time of her experience. Figuring I wouldn’t have to document her story, I probably didn’t take very good notes. I remember conducting the interview and the background noise was so overwhelming when I tried to transcribe the tape I probably never completed the job.

If there are any other adult performers out there who have had UFO experiences drop me a line. We’ll keep your identity to ourselves, or blab it to the world, whatever whets your “noodle” (hum, hum).


Most followers of the UFO mystery will know of what and whom I speak when I say that there are presumably Nordic-type “Space Brothers” living on the Earth alongside us mere mortals, who, while from another place and time, manage to reside here without being detected. Some may not even realize that they have come from the stars, either literally or having reincarnated into an earthly body to make the journey.

To my way of thinking, the Nordics are your dyed-in-the-wool Aryans. Blonde hair. Blue eyes. Six feet tall. They give the impression that they have just gotten off the set of a daytime TV soap opera, perfect teeth, long tapered fingers and a sleek and slender waste line. From what we hear, the Nordic space women are a sight to behold in their form-fitting jump suits. (We’re told no bras are worn on their home planets.) The early contactees George Adamski, Truman Bethrum and Orfeo Angelucci spoke of these visually stunning alien women in glowing terms, but they never did let us peek behind the veil to see what they might have done to support these peace-loving confederation travelers, especially when a close contact was made in the moonlight of the Mojave Desert.

Indeed, we would like to know just how close were these close encounters?

Truman Bethrum’s human wife did identify Aura Raines as the cause of their breakup in divorce papers that she filed in California, and one source close to the contactee once said: “Truman told me that Aura was a sight to behold, even for the most discriminating earthmen’s eye.”


Since this is not a book about the Space Brothers or about UFOs in particular, but one about the sexcapades of our off-world visitors, we promise to stay more or less on topic.

I knew Howard Menger fairly well. He and his wife Connie were good eggs, as far as I was concerned, despite what some skeptical folks might have said about their supposed adventures in space warp speed. Even after they retired from their sign painting business, they would make the long haul from Vero Beach, Florida, to Phoenix or San Diego to speak at my various UFO expos, even going so far as to drag, in a mini-trailer behind their auto, the “XR-1,” a homespun saucer-shaped craft that Howard had built and which he said would eventually fly, or had flown once before, using a series of rotating magnets as its principle means of propulsion. Howard had gotten the plans for this device from his outer space friends, who looked remarkably human and were often seen landing and coming out of your typical saucer-shaped craft that would park in the apple orchard behind his High Bridge, New Jersey home.

In the mid-1950s Howard held an outdoor convention on his property that was well-attended, mainly due to the support given by Long John Nebel, the dean of all night talk show hosts, who was the originator of the paranormal/UFO broadcast type program, long before Art Bell took over the dusk to dawn airwaves (and so recognized). Photographed seated and taking notes on Menger’s grounds was said to be the spaceman, Val Thor, who later was to befriend the late minister Rev. Frank E. Stranges. Stranges had met Valiant inside the Pentagon, where he had stayed with our government’s knowledge for three years. In general, it can be said that from time to time, some very strange “people” were showing up on Menger’s estate. No one who hung around his place on a regular basis hoping for a spacey contact of their own could possibly deny this fact.

As Howard told the story later in life, the sun was shining brightly on that day in 1932 – a day that was to change Menger’s life forever and shape the belief patterns of many who were to be drawn in the years ahead to his uniquely divergent sense of reality.

“There, sitting on a rock by the brook,” Menger poetically reminisced in his memoirs, “The High Bridge Incident,” “was the most exquisite woman my young eyes had ever beheld! The warm sunlight caught the highlights of her long golden hair as it cascaded around her face and shoulders. The curves of her lovely body were delicately contoured . . . revealed through the translucent material of clothing which reminded me of the habit that skiers wear.” To say that the young Howard Menger was more “unworldly wise” than his age would seem to allow is no minor point when relating his life’s most impacting moments.

Howard continues by explaining that the lady on the rock “turned her head in my direction. Even though very young, the feeling I received was unmistakable. It was a tremendous surge of warmth, love and physical attraction, which emanated from her to me. Suddenly, all my anxiety was gone, and I approached her as one would an old friend or loved one. She seemed to radiate and glow as she sat on the rock, and I wondered if it were due to the unusual quality of the material she wore, which had a shimmering, shiny texture not unlike but far surpassing the sheen of nylon. The clothing had no buttons, fasteners or seams I could discern. She wore no makeup, which would have been unnecessary to the fragile transparency of her camellia-like skin with pinkish undertones. Her eyes, opalescent discs of gold, turned their smiling affection on me with a tranquil luminescence.”

This initial contact with a minor under the age of ten did seem overly amorous for such a young boy – we hesitate to think that it went any further than just a brief flirtation and did not involve lewd and lascivious behavior with a minor.

In 1946, when he returned home from the war, Menger met the stone girl again, but this time she had come out of a UFO clad in a gray-blue plaid outfit that outlined her perfect body. After informing her about her mission on Earth – spreading love and peace among men – the girl kissed Menger. He asked if they would see each other again, getting a negative answer. But she promised that one day he would meet her sister, a Venusian incarnated on Earth. “She will work with you and be with you for a lifetime. You will recognize her as soon as you see her,” the saucerian gal confirmed.

The ironic punchline is that years later Howard DID come face-to-face with this spacewoman’s identical twin. Initially, Howard thought that an attractive blonde named Connie Weber, who showed up at one of his conclaves, was the same woman he had met as a youth on the back forty. Eventually, he surmised that she was the reincarnation of a spacewoman that he had known in a biblical sense in a previous life on Venus. Howard divorced his first wife and married the beautiful blonde interplanetary lookalike. They had two wonderful girls and did work together for many decades before Howard passed into the Venusian sunset. (Connie died a few years ago at the age of 95.)


But to get on with our story.

At one point in my publishing career I was a contributing editor for a number of Penthouse-style forum magazines. These were the digest-sized publications that printed actual letters from readers describing their sexual experiences, anywhere from telling how they lost their virginity to how they got away with cheating on their mate. Penthouse Forum was the most “prestigious” of these publications and, being attached to a magazine that sold over two million copies at one point, it had quite a run and could boast of a couple hundred thousand readers at its peak.

There were numerous imitators and these are the publishers I worked for. My job was to rewrite the letters to make them readable. Let me tell you, that was often a hard task. Forgetting the bad punctuation and the terrible spelling, just to read some of these letters and format them so they could be sent to the typesetter was a daunting undertaking. One such digest was Velvet Touch, the offspring of the glossy Velvet, which made a gallant attempt to produce a publication that was “hot enough” to satisfy the most jaded sexual tastes of its largely male audience, yet tried, at the same time, to appear mainstream enough so that women would also purchase the product. If the publishers were lucky enough, they would get the news dealer to place Velvet Touch as close to Cosmopolitan as possible, hoping to attract a bit of a crossover audience.

The publisher at one point was kind enough to place an ad of mine on the magazine’s back cover (which he was unable to sell anyway). In bold type, it screamed – “FORCED INTO SEX ONBOARD A FLYING SAUCER.” I can’t even remember what I was trying to sell!

As it turned out, most of the names on the letters I edited showed that Velvet Touch never really reached far into the women’s market. And while nobody got paid for writing the letters the magazine published, we did have a couple of contributors who seemed to maintain an active sex life and were willing to air their more mundane sexcapades in our pages – more mundane, that is, when compared to the adventures with the sexterrestrials we now find ourselves confronted by.


Reviewing the details of Howard Menger’s romantic interlude with the woman on the rock, this tale positions itself, if anywhere, in the category of a tender alien relationship, which you might think actually belongs as part of the relatively new publishing genre known as “Alien Human Romance,” but we have proof that the New Jersey contactee beat these would-be modern alien romance novelists by several decades. A quick trip to Amazon.com will find such pandering titles you can place in your internet shopping cart as “Alien Pregnant Bride,” “His Alien Virgin,” “Alien Savior” (from the cover, this book looks like it takes a bi-sexual approach to ET lovemaking), and “Alien Sex 101,” which I would have every reason to believe is too much of a primer for our more advanced sexterrestrial hip readers.

Note: My personal “alien out of sexual control” award has to go to “His Human Slave,” described thusly: “COLLARED AND CAGED, HIS HUMAN SLAVE AWAITS HER TRAINING . . . She’s a human, born into slavery . . . Prince Zander bought and paid for her, which means she’s his now. His to use. His to impregnate. Because according to a gene-matching program, she’ll produce the best offspring.”

And you thought alien anal probes couldn’t easily be outdone in this paranormal universe where almost anything seems plausible?

By the way, on a cosmic scale of one to ten, I am told you merely have to look to your average star voyagers from the Pleiades to find the most beautiful spacewomen around (sorry you weren’t so lucky, Mr. Boas).


During the early 1970s, I had organized one of the first metaphysical schools in the country. We had some really talented psychics and occultists teaching a variety of classes on anything from astral projection to reading the tarot cards. People were passing through our doors all day and night to sign up for classes.

I guess I got to meet a lot of unusual people in those days. Like my two female witch friends, Walli Elmlark and the very buxom Witch Hazel (she really had her name changed, she showed me her driver’s license). Walli was the White Witch of New York who wrote a column for the rock magazine Circus. She introduced me to David Bowie and invited King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp to join us in a sky-watch. Hazel, on the other hand, wore black clothing, rode a motorcycle, had a pilot’s license and once or twice sketched out scenes from her past life where she had been tortured – half naked – at the hands of some ruthless male priests. Completely bizarro. But when the pot smoke drifted away, everyone seemed quite normal.

One of the occult school patrons by the name of Ruthie signed up for a couple of classes, and, since she was spending a few hours a week hanging around, we would chit-chat from time to time. She was a rather stocky brunette with curves in all the right places. Hey, I was young and single and had an eye for the ladies, though I made it a policy not to ask out those who entered through our doors who were presumably coming for spiritual guidance.

Ruthie was the type of person who had no problem discussing whatever was on her mind.

One day she told me something was troubling her and, as I was the chief guru, she wanted my opinion.

She told me before signing up for classes at our school that she had attended the functions of a group uptown who had been a lot “darker” in their approach to the occult. Not that we were what you would call “New Age Bliss Bunnies,” but most of our group had aspirations to do good with the paranormal talents they possessed and would even sometimes turn down those who openly said they were seeking psychic revenge on someone who they felt had wronged them or tried to steal their lover away. Things can get rather messy on the astral plane and you don’t know who – or what – you might attract, so “better to leave well enough alone” seemed to be the order of the day at the New York School of Occult Arts and Sciences.

“I met this rather handsome guy over at the other group who was channeling UFO entities on a regular basis,” Ruthie said. “I liked the messages he was receiving. In fact, he looked like one of the messengers from space he called Ashtar.”

As we’ve mentioned, these Nordic, humanoid, Ultra-Terrestrials are typically male, six to seven feet tall with long blond hair, blue eyes and skin tones ranging from fair to tanned, perhaps a bit on the feminine or androgynous side, sort of like a real Ziggy Stardust. They were mostly benevolent and most often possessed telepathic powers that would enable them to read the minds of humans.

Ruthie told me she liked being in the company of this individual since he seemed so “spiritually aware” – and she admitted she was digging on his good looks. After a channeling session at “the other” psychic facility across town, the gentleman (I can’t remember what she told me his actual name was, but let’s just call him “Paul”) asked Ruthie to come back to his apartment to continue the evening’s discussion on UFOs and the arrival of the space brotherhood, which he predicted would happen within a few years (a lot of us thought this might be the case in the early to mid-1970s).

Paul went on weaving the philosophical beliefs of the space brethren into the conversation as they sat sharing the same couch. As the night went on a “warm feeling” overtook the girl, who months later was telling me of her night on the town with a space channeler. She said she didn’t feel shy and that she was beginning to get turned on to him being so close. She was not about to refuse his advances if he tried to make one.

But something more “inappropriate” transpired.

“Before I knew it – and without warning me – Paul slipped into a trance state and began to channel some unearthly entity. But it wasn’t the gentle Ashtar, it was someone who spoke in a more powerful, more uneven, authoritarian voice. He said most earthlings were weak and could not stand up for themselves if an attack from space were to take place. In particular, he said the women of our species were easily manipulated and with that he put his hands on me and began to caress my body harshly but in a masterful way.”

Luckily, there was no one around us as she related her story or I might have been the one to have become embarrassed over the conversation. Ruthie insisted she had little to say about the outcome of the awkward situation she found herself in. “It felt as if I had been partially hypnotized or was under the channeler/spaceman’s mental control. I could not pull away from him as he pressed me to the couch and had his way.”

Ruthie insists the sex was “sort of consensual,” in that she was not drugged nor was she physically forced ultimately to do anything against her will. In fact, she admitted to me that it was the best orgasm she ever had and if offered a ride onboard one of their craft she would not hesitate to take a trip to their home planet. I think she said this half in jest, but maybe she wasn’t kidding, a possibility I considered when I had a chance to think about our conversation later.

Ruthie says she was really “feeling the vibes” from the channeler, but once he came out of the state of mind he was in he didn’t seem to show a great deal of interest in carrying on with the conversation which they then finished up rather quickly.

“I attended a few more of his channeling sessions, and Paul was very civil to me after that night on the couch,” Ruthie remembered. “But the group we were involved in dissolved eventually and I didn’t see him around after that.”

Ruthie wanted to know if she should feel guilty about experiencing a great deal of sexual satisfaction with the entity who almost seemed to possess the body of the UFO channel. I told her it probably wasn’t a good idea to be put into such a compromising position as one might never know until it’s too late what they had gotten themselves into. It could be that the entity was demonic, even if the channeler was not a black magician like Aleister Crowley.

I guess she took my advice as she never brought up the subject again.

I found that such cases as this were not that unusual; though it’s not something most workshop attendees felt comfortable in talking about – only at Tim Beckley’s NY Occult Center it seemed to be OK!

When fire chief Donald Tucker arrived at the scene last week, it was exactly as a 911 caller had reported.

"When I got there, there were flames 8 or 9 feet high shooting out of a hole about 2 feet in diameter," said Tucker, chief of the Midway, Arkansas, Volunteer Fire Protection District. "It burned that way for 30 to 45 minutes before it went out."

A closer look revealed a scorched rim and a hole about 3-1/2 feet deep that Tucker said made a sharp 45-degree turn at the bottom.

"I took a temperature reading of it and it showed 780 degrees inside the hole," Tucker recalled. "But what caused it? I have no idea. There's no gas lines nearby and there was no smell of natural gas."

The fire crew responded to the report of flames shooting out of the ground around 4:15 a.m. Monday. Tucker said he didn't think the odd occurrence was caused by a meteor.

"There's no sign of a strike, no splashed dirt around the edge," he said. "It's on private property, right off the edge of town."

Social media conjecture has taken off, with some believing it was flaming space junk that landed at the site. Others believe it had to be a meteorite.

Midway is an unincorporated area northwest of Mountain Home, Arkansas. Tucker said an employee from Fayetteville-based Black Hills Energy gas company arrived and took photos of the scene.

A spokesman for the company confirmed a technician was sent to check it out.

"Although Black Hills Energy does not provide natural gas service in Midway, Arkansas, the local fire department contacted us to assist with their fire investigation," said Black Hills spokeswoman Amiee York. "Our technicians responded and detected no natural gas in the area. We will continue to partner with the fire department in their investigation as needed."

Tucker alerted Jim Sierzchula, director of Baxter County, Arkansas Office of Emergency Management. Sierzchula said he arrived at the scene after the fire had gone out, but the cause remains a mystery.

"At this time we don't have a clue what it is," he said.  "We do know it's not natural gas.  We've been trying to find out whose property it is."

One clue, perhaps:

"To me, it looks like an existing hole that was there, but what was burning?" he asked. "When I got there it smelled like burned plastic to me."

He said there used to be a gas station near the site of the flaming hole, but so far there's no link to it or to an ignition source. He also has been trying to reach the local phone company, which has lines in the area.

Sierzchula said there were flashes of lightning from storms north of the flaming hole Sunday evening, but no reports of the fire coming out of the ground until early Monday morning.

He acknowledged he is concerned.

"We're just trying to figure it out," Sierzchula said.

Source: Springfield News-Leader
https://www.news-leader.com/story/news/2018/09/18/fire-chief-finds-flames-shooting-hole
-ground-meteorite-space-junk-other/1348180002/

Parallel universes really do exist, according to a mathematical discovery by Oxford scientists that sweeps away one of the key objections to the mind boggling and controversial idea.
    
The work has wider implications since the idea of parallel universes sidesteps one of the key problems with time travel. Every since it was given serious lab cred in 1949 by the great logician Kurt Godel, many eminent physicists have argued against time travel because it undermines ideas of cause and effect to create paradoxes: a time traveller could go back to kill his grandfather so that he is never born in the first place.

But the existence of parallel worlds offers a way around these troublesome paradoxes, according to David Deutsch of Oxford University, a highly respected proponent of quantum theory, the deeply mathematical, successful and baffling theory of the atomic world.

He argues that time travel shifts between different branches of reality, basing his claim on parallel universes, the so-called "many-worlds" formulation of quantum theory.

The new work bolsters his claim that quantum theory does not forbid time travel. "It does sidestep it. You go into another universe," he said yesterday, though he admits that there is still a way to go to find schemes to manipulate space and time in a way that makes time hops possible.

"Many sci fi authors suggested time travel paradoxes would be solved by parallel universes but in my work, that conclusion is deduced from quantum theory itself", Dr Deutsch said, referring to his work on many worlds.

The mathematical idea of parallel worlds was first glimpsed by the great quantum pioneer, Erwin Schrodinger, but actually published in 1957 by Hugh Everett III, when wrestling with the problem of what actually happens when an observation is made of something of interest - such as an electron or an atom - with the intention of measuring its position or its speed.

In the traditional brand of quantum mechanics, a mathematical object called a wave function, which contains all possible outcomes of a measurement experiment, "collapses" to give a single real outcome.

Everett came up with a more audacious interpretation: the universe is constantly and infinitely splitting, so that no collapse takes place. Every possible outcome of an experimental measurement occurs, each one in a parallel universe.

If one accepts Everett's interpretation, our universe is embedded in an infinitely larger and more complex structure called the multiverse, which as a good approximation can be regarded as an ever-multiplying mass of parallel universes.

Every time there is an event at the quantum level - a radioactive atom decaying, for example, or a particle of light impinging on your retina - the universe is supposed to "split" into different universes.

A motorist who has a near miss, for instance, might feel relieved at his lucky escape. But in a parallel universe, another version of the same driver will have been killed. Yet another universe will see the motorist recover after treatment in hospital. The number of alternative scenarios is endless.

In this way, the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics allows a time traveller to alter the past without producing problems such as the notorious grandfather paradox.

But the "many worlds" idea has been attacked, with one theoretician joking that it is "cheap on assumptions but expensive on universes" and others that it is "repugnant to common sense."

Now new research confirms Prof Deutsch's ideas and suggests that Dr Everett, who was a Phd student at Princeton University when he came up with the theory, was on the right track.

Commenting in New Scientist magazine, Prof Andy Albrecht, a physicist at the University of California, Davis, said of the link between probability and many worlds: "This work will go down as one of the most important developments in the history of science."

Quantum mechanics describes the strange things that happen in the subatomic world - such as the way photons and electrons behave both as particles and waves. By one interpretation, nothing at the subatomic scale can really be said to exist until it is observed.

Until then, particles occupy nebulous "superposition" states, in which they can have simultaneous "up" and "down" spins, or appear to be in different places at the same time.

According to quantum mechanics, unobserved particles are described by "wave functions" representing a set of multiple "probable" states. When an observer makes a measurement, the particle then settles down into one of these multiple options.

But the many worlds idea offers an alternative view. Dr Deutsch showed mathematically that the bush-like branching structure created by the universe splitting into parallel versions of itself can explain the probabilistic nature of quantum outcomes. This work was attacked but it has now had rigorous confirmation by David Wallace and Simon Saunders, also at Oxford.

Dr Saunders, who presented the work with Wallace at the Many Worlds at 50 conference at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, told New Scientist: "We've cleared up the obscurities and come up with a pretty clear verdict that Everett works. It's a dramatic turnaround and it means that people now have to discuss Everett seriously."

Dr Deutsch added that the work addresses a three-century-old problem with the idea of probability itself, described by one philosopher, Prof David Papineau, as a scandal. "We didn't really know what probability means," said Dr Deutsch.

There's a convention that it's rational to treat it for most purposes as if we knew it was going to happen even though we actually know it need not. But this does not capture the reality, not least the 0.1 per cent chance something will not happen.

"So," said Dr Deutsch, "the problems of probability, which were until recently considered the principal objection to the otherwise extremely elegant theory of Everett (which removes every element of mysticism and double-talk that have crept into quantum theory over the decades) have now turned into its principal selling point."

Source: The Telegraph (UK)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/09/21/sciuni121.
xml&CMP=ILC-mostviewedbox