Mysterious Universe

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Gigantic structures in the deserts of China lead us down the conspiratorial path this week where we find ourselves treading upon the mystery of the Toynbee tiles and their elusive creator.

Teen bigfoots make an appearance along with killer lake creatures from New Zealand and 30ft tall reptilians in outback Australia.

Read on for show notes, music, and books.

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Taos, New Mexico is a place I like a lot, and which I like to visit a lot, too. It has a cool vibe to it, there always seems to be so much going on, and the architecture – some of which dates back centuries – is amazing. And it’s a place with more than a few tales of the high-strangeness variety attached to it. In fact, very, very high-strangeness…

Salvador was an intriguing guy who I met almost a decade ago. Having inherited a considerable sum of money in his early thirties, he was retired by the age of forty-three, and  lived, as he worded it, “on a permanent vacation” in northern New Mexico. As I sat in the living-room of his spacious, Pueblo-style house in 2002, and ate a fine lunch of chicken and rice, Salvador related to me a remarkable story of truly bizarre proportions. It all began, he explained, on an August evening in 1997.

A keen astronomer, he had taken his truck out to a particularly remote spot north of Taos that was free of light pollution, and where he could set up his telescope and scan the night sky. It was around 1.00 a.m., Salvador recalled, when he heard at an uncomfortably close distance a strange sound that “was like a high-pitched whistle, but that had a human feel to it. But, it was way too high frequency for a man.”

Salvador’s curiosity turned to concern, and then to outright fear, he added, as the whistle was replaced by “an aggressive growl, and heavy footsteps, like something was warning me and marking its territory.” Salvador estimated that the source of the ominous growling was within thirty feet of him. Disturbingly, he got the distinct impression that a hostile entity of some form was actively “circling” him and “getting ready to attack.” That attack never came, however.

Salvador then painted an incredible picture: he sat tight in the back of his truck for about ten minutes as the growling and heavy footsteps continued to torture his terrified mind, when suddenly, in the distance, he could hear the unmistakable sound of helicopter rotor-blades.

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Occasionally, stories of strange phenomenon are so weird in their specifics that, even once several decades separate them from the present day, they still manage to capture our minds and induce paranoia. The odd story of Robert Taylor is one such incident, which involved the observation of a spherical “flying saucer” that, according to Taylor, may have attempted to accost him.

Taylor’s story began on a November morning in 1979, as he was entering a forest alongside the M8 Motorway, joined only by his trusty dog. Taylor had been carrying out his usual business as an area developmental officer, with intent of observing some sapling trees in the forest nearby. The two had traveled by foot into the forest, and upon reaching a clearing a few hundred feet into the area, Taylor was surprised to see a large, circular object hovering above the ground.

The “craft”, which really was just a large, dark-colored metallic sphere, seemed void of any identifying characteristics, save only the appearance of some kind of rim along it’s center, and a series of “portholes” just above this area. Curiously, the craft somehow also managed to appear translucent in certain areas; Taylor likened this to being what he believed was some kind of an attempt by the craft at camouflaging itself. Despite the strange, seemingly otherworldly technology present before him, Robert Taylor then ensured that his encounter would go down in UFO-history (though he knew it not at the time), and started off in the direction of the craft, hoping for a better look…

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Just recently, I re-read a few books from the early years of Ufology, including Harold T. Wilkins’ Flying Saucers Uncensored, Gray Barker’s They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, and The Humanoids, edited by Charles Bowen. And, on doing so, something important struck me. Back in those bygone days, when face-to-face alien experiences were all the rage, the ET’s very often provided the witnesses with names. Unlike today’s modus-operandi of, mostly, downright extraterrestrial anonymity.

While those early alien monikers often sounded like they came straight out of the world of science-fiction (and maybe, in some cases, they did!), the fact of the matter is that, today, even in close encounter cases of a definitively alien kind, the entities seem to be far more anonymous in nature than they were in decades-past. And there’s certainly no better way to gain an understanding of the sheer wealth of curiously-named ETs of the past than An Alien Who’s Who, by Martin S. Kottmeyer, which is published by the good people at Anomalist Books.

Depending on your own personal perspective regarding what lies at the heart of the UFO puzzle, An Alien Who’s Who reveals a great deal about (a) the dizzying variety of weirdly named extraterrestrials that have visited the Earth for a good many years; (b) the tall-tales of a whole range of fantasists and con-merchants; or (c) the way in which the UFO phenomenon, and those within it, are constantly being manipulated and exploited by a true trickster of a type that would make both John Keel and Jacques Vallee very proud.

Or, maybe it’s all three theories, or perhaps none of them. Whatever the case, I know only this much for certain: Martin Kottmeyer’s book is damned good fun and highly informative – and in equal measures, too.

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When you begin the serious study of UFOs, it’s almost impossible to avoid at least some discussion of conspiracy theories. For many, UFOs and aliens themselves are alleged to be a part of some grand conspiracy that deals with genetic manipulation of the populace; on the other extreme, the only conspiracy is the outright lie that UFOs have anything to do with space aliens at all.

However not all such theories are quite so far out; for instance, it’s long been held that the U.S. Government has sought to suppress information about UFOs, prompting the exopolitical community recently to take advantage of the Obama Administration’s “We the People” petitions, in an attempt to get them to release info on UFOs (and as expected, the White House gave their expected response regarding the issue). But what if there really were forces seeking not only to control the dissemination of information regarding UFOs and ETs, but also whether or not certain technologies were made available to the public? Furthermore, how might such supposed groups or cabals be related to the global economy, and it’s control of monetary systems worldwide?

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It’s time for another dose of MU Plus and this one will go down without a spoonful of sugar!

On this exclusive weekend edition of MU Plus+ we take a look at an obscure Australian abduction account, uncover the Pig Lady and discover that the Devil might work out.

Show links and music after the jump.

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They run wild through the streets at night, bearing their blood slathered fangs, tails fluttering behind them as they howl at the moon. No we’re not talking about your typical rogue wolf pack here; these are a gang of high school students who claim to be werewolves. So move over Michael Landon and back off Michael J. Fox, because there’s a new pack of teenage werewolves in town… and they’re proving to be a much more bloodthirsty bunch than their cinematic alter egos.

In a era when “Twilight” books are flying off shelves and teenyboppers across the globe are arguing the relative merits of dating a vampire over a werewolf, it should come as no surprise that a strange sort of paranormal vogue has swept through youth culture like a cyclone, leaving in its wake a plethora of world-weary teens attempting to live vicariously through these supernatural fantasy characters.

As a general rule fads like these come and go with a great deal of fanfare, little cultural significance and a surplus of paranoid adult backlash — anybody remember the Dungeons & Dragons psychosis scare of the 80’s? But in suburban San Antonio, Texas, there is a group of high school kids who are taking this craze to an altogether darker and more dangerous place.

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