Fresno Nightcrawler

The Fresno Nightcrawler, as it is known, is an unusual cryptid that was first sighted in Fresno, California when it was captured on a resident’s security camera. While the footage is not crystal clear, it is sharp enough to see some type of creature or object walking on 2 legs. There does not appear to be any arms or other limbs, giving an appearance somewhat like a self-propelled pair of pants.

The creatures were captured on video again later, in Yellowstone National Park, where two of them are seen strolling across an open field. The odd bipeds seem to be completely at ease, casually sauntering in the night. In both videos the creatures seem to be traveling in pairs, one being slightly larger than the other. Expert analysis concluded that if the footage is indeed a hoax, it was not possible to reproduce with either modern puppetry or digital effects.

What is really weird about these things is they do not match the phenotype of the vertebrate, having only the 2 legs and no arms, wings, or other appendages found in other known animals. Despite the absurdity, the creatures appear to be a pair of white trousers brought to life. If they are an undocumented form of animal life native to earth, they are completely unique in their body structure.

 

While not seemingly aggressive, the alien shape and movements of these entities is definitely disturbing. As comical as it sounds, I bet most of us would be compelled to turn and run if we were being followed by one of these. The awkward gait and cloth-like texture of the figures certainly give it an unnatural air, more like a supernatural being than a biological organism. Supposedly the Native Americans have legends of similar creatures that have existed long before the coming of humanity.

 

It’s possible the “creatures” could be some type of thought-form manifestation, or  tulpa. A stay elemental spirit drawn on the recording by its owner’s uncontrolled psychic energy. Or it could be some weirdo in a costume or another more elaborate hoax. I certainly can’t explain some ofthe things people do.

Whatever the origin of these unusual entities, they certainly rank up there as some of the most outlandish cryptids caught on video. Maybe someday more will be discovered about the nature of the Nightcrawlers and their origins.

Trans-dimensional Bigfoot

Stories of Bigfoot or Sasquatch, as they are known to the Naive Americans of the Pacific Northwest, sightings have been around for as long as people have been able to communicate. There are variations, but by and large, its safe to say that every culture has a Bigfoot lurking somewhere, or at least some type of giant, human shaped creature. The Yeti, the Jotun, the Nephilim, but yet no remains have been documented or live specimens captured. As far as physical evidence goes, we get a few fuzzy videos and homemade plaster casts.

Of course, that may be because these beings are something more than just an undocumented species of ape. Many believe that Sasquatch are actually extra-dimensional entities that exist at a slightly different level of reality. Or at least, most of the time. Under the right conditions, these beings can share the space of awareness with humans. Some people report having made contact with such things, either in person or telepathically. Usually in these cases, the beings are helpful, in the category of spirit guides and prophetic messengers warning humanity of the dangers ahead if we don’t “change our sinful ways.”

There have been more reports of Bigfoot sightings coinciding with UFO activity than Sasquatch hunters and UFO enthusiasts would ever like to admit. I personally don’t see why the two phenomenon have to be mutually exclusive, like its O.K. to chase a big hairy invisible monster through the woods, but only a total nut-ball would believe in aliens flying around the sky. Right. Maybe there is some link? Many pre- Betty Hill extraterrestrial sightings described the pilots of the UFOs as hairy, disproportionate men. Are the Sasquatch one of many alien races visiting Earth? Possible.

It may be that what people are seeing are in fact one of many forms of a hierarchy of intelligent consciousness that we do actually experience at the peripheral of our awareness.  Sometimes made visible to us, sometimes hidden (or we are too distracted with our own bullshit to see it), but always affecting us in subtle ways. Maybe there is some common biological factor that induces the state of mind needed to perceive these creatures. Some would-be debunkers have pointed to things like infrasonic sound waves like 20 Hz causing an altered state of consciousness, leading to hallucinations of creatures or object in the sky. Maybe UFO/Bigfoot “hotspots” are really areas of geographic anomaly, causing a 20 Hz frequency to be broadcast due to resonance in the mineral formations or something similar. Altered state of mind? Check. Contacting extra-dimensional beings? Check. Sounds like a ritual magick operation to me. In which case I think it may be wiser to focus our attention on the messages these beings and objects are trying to communicate to us personally, rather than focusing on finding ways to prove the communication happened to the rest of the world.

Whatever the cause or purpose of the appearance of the creatures is, one thing is certain. They have maintained a place in our collective psyche throughout the centuries, and possibly millennia. The phenomenon of Bigfoot encounters almost certainly goes back beyond recorded history.  Perhaps the Sasquatch have been our guides and guardians all along, helping  humanity behind the scenes in subtle ways overlooked by the vulgar and materialistic. Just think, we all may have our own Guardian Bigfoot  watching over us.

Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram

When people ask me about how to get started with Hermetic magick, I usually point them to Aleister Crowley’s Liber O. It gives the basics of building rituals and practicing Astral projection, including the famous Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram.

The Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, or LBRP, is a declaration and reorganization of one’s alchemical elemental energies, wherein one “banishes” the negative aspects of each of the Hermetic elements with their associated divine names facing the proper direction,  as well as a minor invocation of the 4 elemental Archangels. The whole thing is started and closed with a preliminary ritual, the Kabbalistic Cross.

There are a lot of great resources out there already detailing the movements and and vibrations of the ritual, and many modern magicians use variant rituals, with different divine names or color correspondences. What’s really important is the act of doing the ritual regularly, often enough to be able to perform it from memory. This could be considered something of a spiritual hygiene practice, as undesirable elemental energies will keep reappearing, especially if you are doing things like shadow work or evocation/servitor work. The “open door” principle comes into play, that working these extraneous parts of the mind can have side effects of “bleed over” from the astral, or getting pestered by multidimensional entities. The symptoms can range from as docile as flickering shadows in the corner of the eye, to downright scary – phantom images in mirrors and voices calling from underground or in the walls. Most of these can be easily controlled if not not outright eliminated from a routine usage of LBRP or something similar.

Part of what makes the LBRP great is the utility it provides. It works great as a prelim to meditation or ritual work, as well as a centering and refocusing exercise in day to day life. Some people don’t even leave he house without doing the LBRP.

I would recommend getting the banishing form of the ritual down first, then try it using the invoking form, wherein one is drawing in positive elemental aspects, usually by reversing he direction the pentagram is traced in. This has an effect of charging up, or increasing one’s elemental energy. While this may seem like the better deal, it has been my experience the elemental banishing seems to be what’s needed more often, as we are all constantly generating little negative thoughts here and there that end up dragging us down under collected weight. Consistent cleanup of these little buggers will do you a world of good. I recommend doing it just before a ritual to clear out any lingering psychic residue, and to do the invoking form during certain astral forays or crucial moments of a ritual, to facilitate the desired element.

In time you may move on from here to more advanced hermetic banishings, like the Greater Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram or the Lesser and Greater Banishing Rituals of the Hexagram, that incorporate more elaborate gestures and vibrations, or you may be more comfortable with something simple like the Rosy Cross Ritual or IAO banishing. Or, if you were so inclined, you just do something like clap your hands three times, or say some kind of phrase like, “So mote it be.” Whatever the hell that means. The point is to close the act of magick and reorient yourself back to “normal” mindspace, away from your desire so you don’t get lusty for it. In Liber Null it’s described how loud, fake laughter is a sufficient banishing practice, and I can attest to it working pretty well. It does make you appear to be a crazy bastard to anyone who might walk in on you, but that might well be the case regardless, depending on the magician. 🙂

Mass Hallucinations (Part 2)

So if a mass hallucination is a group of people experiencing some type of sensory malfunction and they all agree to a consensus interpretation, how do we know that the day to day reality we experience isn’t some kind of hallucination as well? How many people does it take to agree on an interpretation of a scenario before it officially becomes “reality?”

We all only have the information our senses provide us to try and piece together some version of reality to place ourselves in to exist. For the most part, we agree on what something looks, or sounds, or feels like; but to what degree and the significance of that information can vary quite a bit.  Our beliefs and expectations can make a huge difference in how that information is processed and what it means.

It would be easy to dismiss a story of a UFO sighting if only one or two people in a large group of individuals present where witness, while 20 others saw nothing unusual. But in most cases involving large groups of people present during a sighting, everyone present sees something. The may not always agree on what exactly it was, but the sensory information reported is consistent. So if the group all decides the consensus perception was flying lights in the sky, doesn’t that make it “reality?” Regardless of what others say after the fact, the truth lies with the beholder. Telling someone the UFO they saw could not be real, based solely on the fact that you have never seen one before is just like telling someone their nose could not possibly itch, because your nose doesn’t itch right now.

 

 

Sharing the Mystery – Mass Hallucinations

 

 

When I was a kid, maybe about 6 or 7 years old, I was spending Christmas vacation at my Grandparents’ farm. On Christmas Eve that year, myself and several of my siblings and cousins saw what I would later understand to be a UFO. The object was a perfect sphere of soft blue light, but somewhat smaller than the full moon which was on the other side of he sky at the time of the sighting. It remained in a fixed location in the sky before abruptly vanishing.
The idea that what we had seen at the time was Santa, or the Star of Bethlehem was discussed among us, being children from a religious family. It wasn’t until years down the road I would begin to piece together the concept that what we had seen that night wasn’t a magical phenomenon, but had a more “scientific” explanation: it was quite obviously a spacecraft piloted by extraterrestrials who are observing us for some unknown reason.
It again wouldn’t be until several more years and experiences later I would develop the current theories I hold for the explanation of these Unidentified Flying Objects that people have been reporting for centuries or more. Ironically enough, I came full circle in a way, as I now feel that the strange lights and objects are perhaps something more mystical in nature that most ufologists say.
The idea that a race of super advanced biological creatures have traveled farther than our current technology can even see, simply to annoy and/or scare the hell out of people without any observable gain or advantage or logical reason seems a bit much for me. I’m sure in some cases secret military projects could be the cause for some sightings, but by and large, when the military wants to keep things secret from the public, they don’t fly low to the civilians and flash their lights at them. Also, I tend to side with what Stephen Hawkins said on the matter, that if the government is hiding the existence of aliens from the public they are better at that one thing than anything else they do.
Now, say for a theory what we are seeing up there is not really a physical craft at all, but something from outside of the current reality we exist in. The idea of portal to other dimensions is not a new idea, but what that might really look like is a subject that is often misunderstood. This concept involves a variable that is outside of what our senses and analytical ability are designed to process. While it is easy to picture a two-dimensional shape (a line) growing longer or shrinking from both ends, and a three-dimensional cube growing or contracting height, width depth, etc. We can even stretch our minds a little to visualize the fourth dimension of “time” or entropy by seeing that same three dimensional cube dispersing into smaller cubes and spreading out into space, or doing the opposite and forming a lager cube from smaller constituent cubes coagulating together. In this way, our minds and senses are designed to observe and process information defined within these dimensions. Now, try to expand that same cube into the fifth dimension. Which direction does the edge of the cube go?
The hypercube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercube is one illustration of how another dimension would interact with space as we know it, but as far as what something existing in this type of space would look like, well…

When the light is dim, our minds will “fill in the blanks” so to speak to provide us with the most accurate perception possible. Sometimes, however people overlook details because this perceptual phenomenon can cause us to see only what we were expecting to see, rather than getting the true input from our sensory organs. This might be why when a person is confronted with an object existing in 4+ dimensions, our minds put together strange impossible objects in the sky, like a mishmash of “close enough” approximations of what we are actually seeing, but our minds and sensory organs are not highly enough developed to process yet. That might also explain the feelings of awe or terror that people have prior to and just after a UFO experience. The overload to the nervous system has to find the closest match to be expressed or processed.
That’s all fine and well you say, but it doesn’t really explain what people are seeing does it? What would cause an additional dimension to suddenly spring into a observer’s perception? It could be a naturally occurring thing like lightning or mineral hot springs, just occurring for a period of time when the conditions are right then vanishing, or they coul be part of a machine or occult metaphysical process operated by independent entities of an unknown nature, they could be psychic projection created in our collective subconscious and displayed in the skies for our group benefit. Or it could be mass hallucinations, which is kind of the same thing.
Although many people may pass off the idea of mass hallucination as a debunking and move on, in a way, isn’t that an even more profound than hidden master races from distant planets, or mystical apprehensions of the Nth dimension, just the fact that having belief in something, even against conventional logic, if shared in a sincere and open way can have a true and powerful effect on everyone participating. If a person can just have an experience that makes the universe feel bigger and more meaningful, and then to be able to share that with another human being in such a fundamental way that it becomes a simple matter of fact, wouldn’t that be the most magical phenomenon of all?