In response to the official launch of the Trump administration’s aliens website last week, two deceased founding members of Parliament Funkadelic - guitarist Garry ‘Starchild’ Shider and keyboardist Bernie Worrell - have joined with dead black musician and activist poet Gil Scott-Heron to release a new album ‘Whitey House Aliens!’.

Scott-Heron explained the three legendary black funksters were “inspired” by the American President’s “ingenious ‘bait & switch’move with the word alien “.

“All those American Disclosure peeps have been sucking up to The Man for years, like they actually believed that honky swindler even knew the meaning of ‘truth’ or cared about something as meaningful as UFOs

“‘Accountability’ and ‘transparency’ are words which have more than one syllable and don’t refer to money or sex, the only things that maggot brain can focus on.

“We’ve been watching all the white American commentators down there congratulating POTUS on his “historic” release of formerly classified UFO files and whoaaa y’all couldn’t wait to see what’s gonna be REVEALED on the aliens website, right?

“Well, what’s been revealed is that The Man wants you to hate immigrants and black people as much as he does and deport everybody but CIS rich whiteys like him out of the country!”

Scott-Heron is referring to the fact that whitehouse.gov/aliens uses the rhetoric of the UFO Disclosure Movement - “cover-up”, 60 year government “secrets”, aliens are already “walking amongst us” - to refer to incidents of crimes by alleged ‘illegal immigrants’.

The site announces Trump is the “one man to tell the truth’ about aliens, and comes with an interactive map of the USA where people can search for crimes by the ethnicity of the perpetrator.

“Sh*t man, I wrote Whitey On The Moon over 40 years ago, that’s all the ‘revelation’ that people need about racism and poverty in America!”

Shider added:

“Yeah, we wet ourselves laughing at ‘the big reveal’! Or rather Gil and Bernie did - luckily I’m still wearing my giant stage diaper in the afterlife!”

Worrel explained:

“When Garry and I and the rest of the Parliament family recorded The Mothership Connection in 1975, we were the black UFO space brothers and sisters bringing The Funk from outer-space to save everybody, including the whiteys.

“Given that creepy old white guy with little hands has indeed made history by being the first convicted felon and sex offender to be elected President, we thought it’s time for The Mothership Afterlife Connection to shine our tractor beam on the aliens you really gotta worry about - the ones in the Whitehouse!”

Whitey House Aliens! by The Mothership Afterlife Connection will be released via telepathic transmission on 26 June 2026, the 10th anniversary of Bernie Worrell’s death.

Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro announced today the entertainment giant was going to remake all 107 episodes of TV series My Favorite Martian with Professor Avi Loeb as the new star.

“My Favorite Martian was a popular American sci-fi TV sit-com that ran from 1963-1966.”

“In the original series, the main character Exigius 121⁄2 (played by Ray Walston) is a human looking 450 year old martian anthropologist stranded on Earth after his spaceship had crashed.”

“The likeable but mischievous martian is befriended and taken home by reporter Tim O’Hara (played by Bill Bixby) who calls him Uncle Martin to hide his real identity. Over the course of the series, Uncle Martin’s extraordinarily advanced powers lead to Tim and other folk being unwittingly caught up in various fantastic scenarios and antics to comedic effect.”

“Disney’s shareholders are understandably concerned about tanking profits, and desperate for me to find a once popular film or series to rehash because that’s all Hollywood has been doing for the last thirty years.”

“Apart from a now-forgotten 1999 film version which was a box-office flop, no-one has tried to exhume My Favorite Martian, and by casting Professor Loeb in the lead role as Uncle Avi, I’ve ingeniously latched onto a way to make this mouldy old bit of TV relevant to the hip Disclosure Generation.”

“Professor Avi Loeb, Head of The Galileo Project at Harvard University, is now the most famous and most loved astrophysicist in the world because he knows more about the Universe and aliens than anyone else.”

“So casting Loeb as playing essentially himself was a no-brainer in terms of mass appeal.”

“Avi has been closely involved in rewriting all the scripts, ensuring that the high-jinx in every episode are “scientifically possible” and Uncle Avi provides befuddled characters with explanations about “what just happened” from his vastly superior mind.

Professor Avi Loeb endorsed D’Amaro’s idea as “visionary”.

“I am but a humble scientist only interested in facts, but I keep telling people, over and over again, we cannot be “at the top of the food-chain” in the Universe because a) life only appeared on Earth in the last third of cosmic history and b) the Universe is a humongous food-chain.“

“I have also warned that there are likely planets occupied by Übermenschen but, more positively, there’s probably oil on Mars that America could dig up and give to Elon Musk.”

“I only have a few minutes of screen time playing myself in the forthcoming film Sol Hershowitz’s Guide to Extraterrestrial Life. But in the My Favorite Martian reboot, I can look forward to 107 feel-good episodes where I can go through every single one of my theories, and melt even the hardest hearts in the Department of War to find a few more billion for The Galileo Project.”

D’Amaro added that another boon to shareholders was the fact that Disney will remake the entire series by using AI, and the only ‘real’ actor will be Professor Loeb “who looks so much like Ray Walston, it’s uncanny.”

UAP Press tried to reach the 65 members of Professor Loeb’s family who were killed in Nazi concentration camps to ascertain their views on whether beings that embodied the Nazi ideology of Übermenschen might pose a threat to Earth citizens.

Only one responded from the afterlife (on condition of anonymity) “They’re already in charge, you schmuck”.

In response to a directive by President Trump, The United States Department of War yesterday released the first tranche of classified UFO videos filmed by military and intelligence services on a new website dedicated to disclosure: https://www.war.gov/UFO/

The videos released so far show numerous luminous objects of unknown origin performing anomalous maneuvers at various locations around the globe in recent years.

The videos, which are black and white, grainy and shot with a variety of high tech military cameras including infrared, have been criticised by influential deceased French filmmakers.

George Méliès (1861-1938), a pioneer in the then new technology of cinematography, described the videos as “trés merde” compared to his masterpiece A Trip To The Moon (1902) one of the earliest films ever made.

“I used every ounce of my exceptional French ingenuity and money to produce a spectacular film, packed with special effects I invented, that screened for months in Paris, keeping theatre houses packed until midnight.”

“I created A Trip To the Moon, the first science fiction film ever made, in 1902. I did it all with mechanically operated scenery painted by local artists, painstaking substitution film splices, and I was the first to put a camera on a rail-fitted ramp to get tracking shots.”

“My film was so incroyable that Edison Manufacturing Company duplicated a print without my permission and made a ton of money in America selling it to theatre houses, without crediting me as the filmmaker or giving me a single centime.”

“Here they are in 2026, the Americans, hoping audiences will be dazzled by fuzzy images where you can’t even see the UFO properly most of the time because the camera target- locking crosshair obscures it.”

“And Disney Corp has just sacked another 1000 staff because it’s cheaper to “use AI to improve the creative process”, which is dis donc parce que Disney has stolen from the internet every bit creative content ever produced by a human and trained their AI on it.”

“The only thing the American entertainment industry has ever been good at is stealing, and their generals and politicians are all still imbéciles. “

“At the next classified briefing given to Congressional UAP Taskforce members held in a SCIF, I am going to pop in and let out a fart énorme of ‘unknown origin’ which they’ll be trapped in for hours.”

Dead French New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022) has also criticised the Pentagon’s footage as “visual plagiarism of my style, but leaving out all my ideas”.

“I made independent art-house auteur films in the 1950s & 60s that influenced a whole generation of American filmmakers, often using collage, discontinuous narrative, jump cuts, cameras focusing on the ‘wrong’ thing.”

“All those styles are evident in the Pentagon videos, but, as is typical with American films, they are sans the formidable philosophical musings that most of my films were actually about.”

“Unlike Méliès, I’m ok with the black and white grainy look, weaving camera-work and doomy atmosphere.”

“But I did all that in my 1965 dystopian tech/ film noir/science-fiction masterpiece Alphaville, which had a computer controlling the minds of citizens and reducing them into tranquilised submission.”

“That was the whole point of the film – a statement about where society was headed - and I made it before anyone had home computers, let alone the internet, and everyone losing their minds about AI taking over the world.”

“The Pentagon has a multi-trillion dollar budget, but évidemment, that kind of money still doesn’t buy brains or talent in America.

“Spielberg owes every interesting idea he ever had to two Frenchmen, François Truffaut and Jacques Valée.”

“Americans are now waiting for Spielberg’s Disclosure Day movie to tell them what to think. But I’ve already seen the ending, it’s all been done before.”

Dead French New Wave filmmaker and actor François Truffault (1932-1984) could not be reached in the afterlife for comment, but left a cryptic message on the UAP Press Office phone saying only “Bon appetit!”

Stewart Alexander

I first became aware of the extraordinary gifts of Stewart Alexander, a British trance and physical medium, when I read New York Times investigative journalist Leslie Kean’s compelling book Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence For An Afterlife (2017) (which was subsequently made into a 2021 six part Netflix docu-series ).

In one of her last chapters, Kean documents her own astonishing experience with one of Stewart’s seances which she undertook as a “personal experiment”. Stewart is a rare contemporary example of a physical medium, whose integrity and verified demonstrations of impossible things happening in his séance circles (both private and public) have made him world renowned.

So in October 2024, when I found out that Stewart lived near Hull which is only 3 hours away from Hexham, Northumberland, where I had been based that UK summer, I thought I’d try my luck and see if there was any chance I could be invited to one of his private seances where he allows guests. Given his reputation, I assumed he would be deluged with requests and I may not even hear back.

But to my amazement, he got back to me almost immediately with a very warm and humble response. If he had known I was so close by, he could have made room for me earlier in the year, but as I was heading back to Australia in a few weeks, he could put my name on a waitlist and I could try my luck again next UK summer.

But before I begin my account of my séance experience, it’s probably best to assume most people haven’t read much about mediumship, so here’s a quick beginners guide.

For The Beginners: A Quick Sketch of Medium modalities.

To place Stewart in context for those unfamiliar with the different ways in which people claim to connect with the dead, in Western mediumship there are three main (not mutually exclusive) modalities: mental, trance and physical.

Mental mediumship is where the medium sits with you and receives impressions of various kinds (words, images, feelings) from spirits who are generally (although not always) known to you, often departed loved ones. A mental medium then conveys these impressions and messages to you in their normal voice. I consulted a medium (mental) for the first time in my life in March 2022, the information she conveyed from my dead parents was unexpected, accurate (including private incidents that only I knew about) and the session was followed that evening by some further (fairly dramatic!) incidents where my Dad was certainly letting me know he was around!.

I’ll write more about how Dad lets me know he’s around in a later post, but for now the most important take-away from that experience was a feeling of overwhelming joy and the (extremely happy) shock of realising – for sure – there is a lot more to reality than meets our workaday eyes.

As there are a great number of people who profess mental mediumship powers (who sell their services privately and/or are found in more public forums such as Spiritualist Churches), the business of after-life communication is obviously an industry where the supernaturally gifted rub shoulders with the partially talented or outright frauds. However, there is at least one institute – The Windbridge Research Centre – that tests mental mediums using scientific-derived protocols (such as double-blind and triple-blind experiments) to assess accuracy, degree of talent and tries to operate like a kind of professional certification/ quality accreditation organisation for mediums working in the USA.

Trance mediums feel they are being taken over (with their permission) by the spirit themselves, go into an altered trance state where they temporarily lose consciousness and speak to you in the voice of the departed. They usually don’t remember what has transpired when they wake up out of the trance state.

Dr Helane Wahbeh is the Director of Research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and while she trained and qualified in clinical scientific research, she was actually born into a family with a matriarchal lineage of female trance mediums. She describes her personal experience of acquiring/ inheriting trance medium powers, as well as her broader views about so called ‘non-local consciousness’, in her book The Science of Channelling: Why You Should Embrace Your Intuition and Embrace The Force That Connects Us All (2021).

Physical mediumship is the rarest mediumship modality of all. It involves the medium becoming a conduit for spirit manipulation of physical objects, as well as conveying messages from the dead in either a trance or semi-trance state.

Physical mediums are usually considered curiosities of the past. In the heyday of spiritualism in the late 19^th /early twentieth century, seances became very popular amongst people from all classes and professions (including prominent scientists and politicians), and physical manifestations e.g. table levitation, rapping and other sounds, apparitions, strange glowing viscous mists from the bodies of mediums (which came to be called ectoplasm) were often witnessed and reported.

It was this Victorian explosion of apparent paranormal phenomena in domestic settings, ghosts appearing in the parlour rather than in cursed old buildings, dark woods or graveyards where they had previously been properly confined, combined with the claims that ordinary people – shockingly, even working class people – could make contact with the dead and miraculous things could occur outside the sanction of the Church and religious doctrine - that led to the establishment of the Society for Psychical Research in London. Founded by a group of British scholars, scientists and intellectuals from wealthy backgrounds, the SPR’s purpose was (and still is) to investigate “mesmeric, psychical and ‘spiritualist’ phenomena in a purely scientific spirit.”

Physical mediumship (or at least public displays outside of private séance circles) does indeed appear to have waned to near-extinction by the end of the 20th century. But not entirely.

For example, from 1993-1998, four British mediums in the small Norfolk village of Scole, conducted 500 seances which produced more than 100 different kinds of phenomena, such as apports (objects appearing out of thin air), poetry & drawings appearing on unopened & unprocessed 35 mm film, myriads of light manifestations, and a luminous quartz crystal that changed state from tangible to intangible then back again. The SPR were invited in and produced this 450 page report where they found no evidence of fraud. This documentary about the Scole Experiments is utterly fascinating.

I refer to the Scole Experiment in my April 12 post about Chris Bledsoe’s orb footage, and I’ll come back to that connection in the next blog. This post is Part One of what of what is going to be a series of posts about communicating with the dead - including an experiment I did with AI ‘mediumship’ last year (spoiler alert: the results were really funny!) And yes, there are people promoting AI mediumship as a ‘thing’ now (at least in America), but I’m not going to going into that here.

My lucky day

I got in touch with Stewart early in 2025, and luck was with me again: he had just agreed to hold a circle with invited guests at the house of a friend Gerald* in York on June 18^th. I should just drop Gerald a line to let him know I was going to attend, but - and Stewart’s attitude here, for me, is very important - he apologised profusely but guests would need to pay Gerald £40 to cover costs.

(Gerald isn’t his real name, but I’m avoiding mentioning séance members by name out of respect for their privacy but also because I’m terrible at remembering names!)

Unlike celebrity mental medium stadium and TV fillers such as John Edward and Tyler Henry, Stewart has never tried to make a living or achieve stardom out of his gifts, earning his living from his trade as an engineer. Stewart, on principle, does not charge for people to experience his seances because he regards proving the existence of survival after death as a “service to humanity”, In this 2007 interview, he elaborates:

“Can you yourself think of a more spiritually fulfilling experience than witnessing the absolute joy on sitters faces after a séance when they have been totally convinced that for a short time they have been in the presence of eternity. To see such joy when sitters have been reunited with their lost loved ones. Well - how can one put a price on that?”

Preparing for the séance: tea, biscuits and chit chat

The early June weather in beautiful York (and most of the UK) last year was brilliantly sunny, and I enjoyed the late afternoon short walk to Gerald’s Victorian semi-detached which was not far from the train station. He showed me into the modest living room where Stewart and others were sitting around having cups of tea and chatting waiting for everyone to arrive. There were about 12 – 14 of us, thus doubling the size of the private circle of friends that Stewart has sat with every week almost continuously for the last thirty years.

Both the look of the house and the vibe of the gathering was warm, homey, down to earth and friendly. The ‘party of Dutch ladies’ who Gerald told me would be among the guests were exactly as I pictured them to be – middle aged, jovial and chatty. In fact, everyone there was, like me, middle-aged or older, with the exception of a chap I’d guess in his thirties who had come from Preston (Lancashire) to learn from Stewart’s circle, as he had been trying to manifest phenomena in his little circle for a couple of years, with mixed success.

As Stewart was on the other side of the crowded room, I didn’t get to talk to him until after the séance. But I enjoyed the chatter around me: the Dutch ladies talked enthusiastically about how much they were enjoying their holiday in York and exploring the area. John (Gerald’s partner) told them about a wonderful perfectly preserved Edwardian tea-room in Whitby serving tea and scones on period china in opulent polished wood décor, which he would have recommended they visit for a “quintessential British” experience had it not sadly closed down recently.

The Lancashire chap and I talked about the merits of driving North on the M6 versus the M1 (the M6 scenery gets quite spectacular north of Preston), and he shared the difficulties he’d been having finding people with the “right energies” for his private séance circle.

As the above sketch suggests, this was a convivial gathering of friendly, unpretentious people chatting about the ordinary and the extraordinary with the same ease. The humble Yorkshire sitting room looked and felt nothing like the entertainment industry’s usual portrayal of the places and people who encounter the dead: popular TV shows like the long-running American series Ghost Hunters or even the BBC’s more recent and middle-brow Uncanny uniformly tell stories of scary, unpredictable encounters with unseen entities seemingly hell-bent on frightening the pants off unwitting humans who are portrayed as victims of the shocking unknown. The dead too are portrayed as wily prey, creatures often eluding courageous thrill-seeking ‘investigators’ who seek to trap and display spirit physical traces like trophies.

The dangers of ectoplasm

When it was time, we stood up to leave for the adjacent room set up for the séance, but Gerald asked for the group’s attention for an important safety announcement. Everyone had to make sure they had nothing in their pockets (no bags allowed), as mobile phones could suddenly light up if a call or message came through, and any light except infrared was dangerous when Stewart was in a trance.

I understood this caution, as earlier this year I read Stewart’s book An Extraordinary Journey, which is as much a history of physical mediumship as it is an autobiography, and there are documented accounts of mediums suffering physical injury and even subsequent death when bright lights have suddenly been switched on during a séance, so I understood the caution.

In the same 2007 interview referenced above, Stewart makes it clear what’s at stake for him each time he conducts a session in public:

“There has to be – for my safety – certain do’s and don’ts – what people can and cannot do. To them I am a total stranger. To me they are total strangers. I must trust them not to place my life in danger by acting irresponsibly. As I said earlier – conditions of the séance room are so vitally important. If we have an atmosphere of doubt and uncertainty then the quality of communication on all levels will suffer. We should sit together in absolute trusting harmony. Then, we will be doing everything the Spirit World expects of us and then it is up to them. I honestly believe that the phenomena and indeed the séances as a whole will always speak for themselves and no one, except the eternal skeptic, will ever leave them in any doubt whatsoever.”

Darkness can be, and has been, used as a requisite cover for a medium or co-conspirator to fake manifestations by various means. However, we don’t know how the body of a genuine physical medium can do what it does, we also don’t know what light (ultimately) is either, and but we do know that it affects the material world in profound ways. This long passage from Stewart’s book about darkness and the mysterious substance called ectoplasm (p 39-40) is worth reflecting on:

“One might as well argue that the darkroom was unnecessary for early photographic development. No one today would question the absolute fact that light is fatal to certain micro-organisms, and to the germination of seeds. Nor would anyone question the fact that the development of an embryo in the darkness of the womb is essential for the creation of life itself.

Is it therefore logical to dismiss and reject utterly the dark conditions of the séance room, based upon little more than ignorance of the delicate mechanics involved or merely upon un-reasoned suspicion? We knew from all that we had read, that for any physical manifestation to occur, then a medium must possess within them an abundance of the illusive living energy known as ectoplasm and although it exists to a greater or lesser degree in all life forms, such a medium is believed to possess a surfeit. In character it is neither physical nor spiritual. It is unique to neither world but it is common to both.”

Ectoplasm…plasma…Plasma is the term physicists give to the fourth state or phase of matter (after solid, liquid and gas) and according to this Wiki entry (referencing NASA) “while rarely encountered on Earth, it is estimated that 99.9% of all ordinary matter in the universe is plasma”. Plasma & plasma aerospace research allegedly associated with UFOs, is a hot topic in the UFOlogy world right now, and I’ll muse on that a bit in my next post.

The Séance

We filed into the séance room which was very small, with chairs arranged in a circle around a little round table in the centre. On the table were two ‘spirit trumpets’ – these are light-weight tapered cones/ funnels made of aluminium, about half a metre long tapering out to a diameter of about 10 cm. These objects, that look a bit like old fashioned hearing horns, had long been offered as popular playthings for the dead in spiritualist circles. There were luminous strips taped around the end of the ‘trumpet’ bells. There was also a small children’s drum and sticks.

Opposite me, Stewart sat in a large wooden chair and his home circle helpers fastened his wrists securely to each arm with plastic cable ties. This had nothing to do with his safety, but was done to demonstrate to circle guests that he could not get up and busy himself with faking the physical phenomena that may occur under the cover of dark.

Before the lights were turned off, Gerald explained that if the trumpets were to fly around the room as they usually did, we were not to grab them as “they are connected to Stewart’s nervous system”. However, if they were to tap us on our heads or waggle in our faces (which they sometimes did), that was fine. Stewart was still recovering from an illness, but the positive energy generated by everyone was the key: happy enthusiasm, conviviality, wonder - “trusting harmony” was the magic carpet that Stewart ‘s spirit friends needed to float the impossible into our world.

The séance then commenced following the same decades long protocols I had read about in Stewart’s book and other accounts of his circles: one of Stewart’s private circle helpers started some easy listening taped music,, the lights were then turned off and the room was almost entirely black, except for the round glow of the trumpet ring strips. Stewart asked for a circle of loving energy to surround the room and discourage any “mischievous spirits” from trying to gate-crash the party.

Then the music stopped. In the black silence, I could hear Stewart’s breathing had become heavy and laboured. I felt a flicker of concern for this elderly gentleman’s health, and wondered how long it took for him to enter a trance, assuming this could take some time.

But to my astonishment, almost immediately a deep male voice started up which appeared to be projected not from Stewart but from a corner of the room to his right. I knew from Leslie and Stewart’s books that there were now 4-5 regular spirit guides with distinct roles and personalities that turn up regularly to the circles, but I assumed that all the different voices would be talking through Stewart. But in writing this post, I checked Stewart’s book An Extraordinary Journey again and found that apparently this spirit had for many years been working on being able to create an audible voice without using a human larynx.

The voice introduced himself as White Feather, which I knew had been the first spirit guide to connect with Stewart in the mid 1970s and started him on his physical mediumship journey. White Feather welcomed everyone and explained that the objective of the spirit manifestations was to show “what can be achieved with the power of loving energy.”

Then a cheery English child’s voice came from apparently the same corner of the room. He introduced himself as Christopher who had died a long time ago aged “6 and a bit”. Christopher explained his role was to relax everyone, he made jokes about “being the star of the show” and people laughed as he narrated his comedic struggles to “put on his body parts”. I heard various noises including what sounded like boots clomping around the room.

After Christopher said “cheerio!”, a strong male North American voice filled the room. He introduced himself as Walter Stinson who had died “over 150 years ago”. This voice appeared to be coming from Stewart’s direction. I’d read that Walter died in a railway accident in 1911 and returned as the former spirit control of early twentieth century trance medium “Margery” Mina Stinson Crandon, who died in 1941, still under a cloud of suspicion and ridicule by skeptics. Walter explained he was here to “finish the work he started” with his sister, and vindicate her belief that the dead can and do communicate with people on the other side of the veil.

Walter then asked one of Stewart’s home circle helpers to switch on the infrared light so that “the lady sitting opposite can come forward and sit by me. I will show her something she will never forget.” That was me!

The dim red light was switched on and I was helped to sit in the chair next to Stewart. The light went off but I could make out in the very dim ambient light that Walter was indeed speaking through Stewart, although my mind found it hard to connect the strange authoritative voice with Stewart’s unconscious facial features.

Walter instructed me to “place my hand gently on Stewart’s, and then very gently feel up his arm”. As I did so he asked “Can you feel the strap?” and I confirmed that I could the feel the plastic cable tie that fastened his arm to the arm of the chair. Then he directed me to place my hand gently back on top of Stewart’s and keep it there. When I did so Walter said, “Now I am going to pull Stewart’s arm through the strap so don’t let go.” Stewart’s arm rose straight up from the arm of the chair. He asked me to feel Stewart’s arm again and I told the room there was no cable tie there. Following instructions, I placed my hand back on top of Stewart’s hand again and his arm lowered back down. Then I moved my hand up his forearm again and told the room I felt the strap fastened back where it had originally been.

I had read about Walter’s aptitude for demonstrating this secular version of transubstantiation – the conversion of Stewart’s arm and/or strap into a spiritual form that still felt and looked solid but clearly had temporarily shed the properties of matter that prevents solid objects moving through each other. Leslie Kean, in her session with Stewart in 2013, had also been fortunate enough to be chosen by Walter to part of the same demonstration. Even Leslie, long open-minded about all things paranormal including UFOs (its her books and journalism in the latter that has now made her famous), was completely astonished by the experience. I think it was a personal metaphysical turning point for her and the reason she handed over the writing of the last chapter in Surviving Death to Stewart, effectively giving him and his spirit friends the last word.

Gerald had earlier light-heartedly informed the group that “Walter was quite the ladies’ man” – meaning he had a penchant for choosing ladies rather than gents to sit with him. Nevertheless, I felt what I imagined Leslie felt – a sense of deep privilege and gratitude to have experienced this ‘miracle’ first hand. I thought that was it for my close up and personal spirit encounter, and would be asked to return to my chair, but Walter wasn’t done with me.

“I want now to make some internal adjustments to you if I may, do you understand?”

I didn’t actually understand what “internal adjustments” Walter had in mind (although I had some hopes), but I replied “Yes, I understand. Please go ahead.”

There followed a minute or two of silence, filled only with the sound of Stewart’s still laboured breathing. I had hoped that some positive energy boost was what Walter had in mind. I felt a strong glow of gladness and calm, bathing in a very unfamiliar emotional oasis of trusting the power of good intentions of all beings present - it was the same feeling that flooded me at my first ever medium session (mentioned above) in Melbourne two and a half years prior.

Walter then said “I have done my best. You may switch on the light and return this lady to her seat”.

The infrared light was switched on and I edged my way back to my seat. Then Walter selected another seat occupant to come to the table for another “experience you will never forget”. I was delighted when I realised it was one of the Dutch ladies! Who was now sure to have a “quintessential British experience” that was more memorable than tea and scones in Whitby.

The Dutch lady followed Walter’s instructions and sat at the little table. Unfortunately her back was in front of me, so I couldn’t see what happened on the table, although Walter cautioned it was unlikely anyone else would be able to see what she was seeing so (like me) for the benefit of the group she would have to report out loud what she was witnessing as the phenomena developed.

The Dutch lady described a glowing mist appearing in front of her, then the mist appeared to be forming into a shape. Then the shape became clearer “It’s a hand!” she exclaimed. The shape coalesced into what was apparently a very solid looking hand.

Walter urged: “Go ahead and shake it, its my hand.”

The Dutch lady told us she was reaching out and shaking the hand. “Its solid, just like a real human hand!”

Walter offered: “But describe the skin”.

The Dutch lady said: “It’s real skin! But it’s soft, more like a woman’s hand than a man’s”

Walter explained: “Yes, that’s the best I can do! Not like the skin I used to have.”

The Dutch lady then described the hand dissolving back into a shape, then a mist, then it was gone. Walter permitted the infrared light to be switched on again, she made her way back to her seat, and it was time for another familiar spirit to make their entrance.

An older woman’s voice (coming from the direction of Stewart) with a spritely English accent and mannered style of speaking suggesting turn of last century middle-class properness introduced herself as Freda. She explained her role as helping the departed reconnect with loved ones on earth.

“There are so many of them!” she exclaimed. “They are all shouting at me, I wish they’d stop shouting at me!”

This made me giggle inside, as prior to the séance, I had joked with a couple of friends with whom I had shared my forthcoming afterlife adventure, that I thought there would be “lots of pushing and shoving on the other side” for spirits to get through. I personally have lost several close loved ones, and if you multiply that figure by the number of people in the group séance, then it would surely be an otherworldly scene akin to the surge of people trying to break down the barricades at Glastonbury Festival in the early days.

Freda indicated that a recently passed chap by the name of Malcolm had come through who urgently wanted to talk to one of the guests. One of the male guests made a gasping noise, the dim red light was switched on again and he made his way to sit by Freda/Stewart.

There followed a very moving interchange between Malcolm/Freda (speaking through Stewart) and the male British guest. Malcolm introduced himself as the guest’s work colleague who had recently died in an accident which he described. He then described how people had tried to help him, there was confusion and regret over his death, but he wanted to reassure loved ones left behind that he “understood everyone did the best they could” and they should stop fretting. When he passed over to the other side he was overwhelmed “with how many people were there to welcome him”. Everything was ok.

The infrared light was switched on again and Malcolm’s work colleague, smiling but also visibly shaken and moved, made his way back to his chair.

It was then time for the entertainment to begin.

The dead can dance: or at least their trumpets can

Gerald announced that it was time to see if the energy in the room would be enough to enable the spirit trumpets to dance around. Sound and music – music in particular – was very helpful in lifting the energy, so everyone needed to join in for a sing-along.

I wondered what song we could possibly all sing together that would encourage the dead to dance?

Contemporary pop culture music genres that riff on transcendental gateways include the slow lush synth pad sweeps of New Age meditation music, the harmonic resonant drones of Tibetan singing bells and Siberian throat singers, the reverb and distortion drenched guitars and operatic shrieking of Death Metal, and the bass-heavy, catchy romantic gloominess of every Goth song you can think of. The soundtracks of every occult-themed TV show and films (that I can think of) draw on the High Seriousness of the spooky sonic pallet, the kind of dramatic + eerie music that signals ‘ominous’ ‘prepare yourself to be really scared’.

And, combining a bit of everything, there is of course the legendary Australian/British darkwave band Dead Can Dance, featuring Lisa Gerard’s “haunting” vocals channelled through those shimmering 4AD-esque wall of sound studio effects.

But when nice dead people have graciously accepted your invitation to actually show up in your room, and most of them hail from around the Edwardian era, then its only good manners to sing a song they might actually like.

One of the circle yelled out “She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes!” Everyone joined in immediately with this instantly recognisable antique children’s song, an American folk tune that was first published in The American Songbag in 1927, but was based on a slave spiritual song adapted by railway workers in the 1890s.

I only knew the words to the first verse, but as each subsequent verse consists of repeating a different silly phrase over and over again, it wasn’t hard to keep catching up with the rollicking vocal ruckus. Despite the dark, I knew everyone was, like me, staring at the glowing circles of the spirit trumpet bells, motionless on the table, hoping they’d put on a show.

After about the fourth verse, suddenly first one, then the other, trumpet shot into the air.

We all stopped singing and whooped with delight. The glowing circles swung over people’s heads first on one side of the room, then darted over to the other side to do the same, then back. This went on for about a minute, including occasional darts high to the ceiling, then down. Then the trumpets really got into the swing of things, snapped close together and synchronised movements, dancing together in jaunty bobs and swoops around the room. The little toy drum started up, with very loud rat-a-tat-tats. This went on for about another minute or so.

Then the drum went silent, and the glowing orbs of the trumpet bells floated down the table and were motionless again.

Gerald then asked everyone to thank our spirit friends for their co-operation and wonderful show (which we all did with enthusiasm) and that it was time to finish the séance. He thanked the circle of loving energy for surrounding us and we were now bidding the other side farewell.

The main lights were then switched on, and I saw Stewart’s head, which had been slumped to the side, rise up and he drowsily asked “Is it over?” I saw one of his private circle friends pull out a pair of scissors and carefully cut his wristbands so he was released from his chair.

The meaning of Walter’s ‘tricks’

After I had borrowed a lighter from Gerald and went outside to sit on the front steps and have a mental reset fag in the still bright sunlight (Northern England’s summer is brief when measured via the vertical flip of calendar months, but long when experienced horizontally through up to 18 hours of daylight each day), I went back inside to join the group now back in the living room, helping themselves to some of the cake treats Peter had spent the day baking. I saw Stewart sitting by the cake table, looking (I thought) a bit frail and tired, and I seized the opportunity to sit by him and chat.

After thanking him profusely for letting me join his circle, I expressed concern over his health, as the session seemed to require a great energetic exertion on his part.

· I have skipped over a couple of incidents in the séance where two people – myself included – were called by Freda to sit by Stewart because there were people on the other side “desperate to show themselves to you”. I saw what appeared to be a glowing mist form around Stewart’s face (ectoplasm?), the group were offering cries of encouragement to the spirit people for what we were warned was a very difficult exercise which often failed. However, as much as I too was willing a familiar face to form in front of me, I was also very conscious of Stewart’s unconscious face scrunched in effort and the sounds of his increasingly laboured breathing which filled me with concern. The manifestations did not succeed, despite Freda describing “intense emotions”. Stewart, of course, when he came to, would not have remembered any of this.

Stewart explained that having guests – strangers – in the room did indeed require a lot of energy to manifest physical phenomena, but in his regular private home circle, sitting together weekly for almost 30 years, it was not draining at all, it was an effortless and comforting ritual. But because his health was indeed poorly, a respiratory virus he was finding hard to shake, he had decided that he would fulfil his promise to allow guests into two more circles before the end of the year, but then that was it. He would retire permanently from public demonstrations of his abilities.

I felt another shiver of gratitude, realising the great good fortune that I happened to be in the right place at the right time to be one of the very last people who would ever be an eye-witness to this humble man’s extraordinary abilities.

I ventured my observation that Walter’s ‘arm through plastic-wristband matter and back again’ demonstration reminded me of the Scole experiments, where investigators were invited to touch a quartz crystal that had materialised which, at first pass, felt rock solid, but at second pass, they were able to pass their hands straight through it. Did he think that Walter’s ‘trick’ was meant to show that matter – humans included – is both material and immaterial? Humans and spirits were essentially different sides of the same common transcendental coin? Stewart agreed that seemed to be what it was about.

Stewart (of course) was a friend of the Robin and Sandra Foy (the main couple instigating the Scole seances mentioned above). The Foys, like Stewart, were humble folk from working class backgrounds relying on ordinary jobs their whole lives to make a living. Robin was born in Blackpool in 1943, and one afternoon in the early 1960s, when he was a young pilot officer stationed at RAF Hornchurch, he heard a disembodied female voice speak very clearly to him in his room. It was only decades later that the healing gifts that the voice told him he possessed came to full fruition in the cellar of a former 17^th century farmhouse he and his wife purchased in the obscure Norfolk village of Scole.

Stewart said “They worked so hard, they proved so much. They’ve passed away now.”

A treasure trove if you want it

I felt by the tired tone of Stewart’s voice that he was perhaps trying to accept, towards the end of his life, that he’d done all he was capable of to show people that when the physical body dies, its not the end of us. That we are more than our physical bodies. We can communicate with the dead if we want, taking care to have the right physical conditions, warm and caring emotional states and good intentions. The evidence is there, decades of it, and Stewart has spent most of his life amassing as much primary source material as he can about the practices of past physical mediums, including tracking down first hand witnesses to séance phenomena. He is donating this huge archival treasure trove (including his own personal records) to the Archives of The Impossible at Rice University, the ingenious brainchild of Professor Jeffrey Kripal and Karen Austin.

I think if you do your own research (as I have tried to do in recent years) putting aside assumptions there is a boundary between ‘the natural’ and ‘the supernatural’ (we put that conceptual fence there, nature didn’t), a ‘real’ boundary between the possible and the impossible which current scientific thinking and methodologies can be relied upon to prove (there isn’t and they can’t, even a cursory familiarity with the history and philosophy of science shows how that boundary keeps moving) then the evidence for post-mortem survival is there. Stacks of it, if you want it.

Stewart Alexander has stated repeatedly that he doesn’t philosophise or delve into metaphysical explanations, he is a very practical minded chap (an engineer after all). He sees his role as providing a safe and positive space for people to experience for themselves physical phenomena produced by well meaning folk from beyond the veil, including much missed loved ones. Yet another reason to love and respect this great but humble Northerner. And if this blog has piqued your interest in Stewart’s life and work (which I really hope it has), then buy his book (you won’t regret it), and you can also check out this video of a rare interview he did with Jeffrey Mishlove in 2020.

So I’ll wrap up this post with a famous song routine by two other great Northerners – Eric Morcambe and Ernie Wise. Some of my happiest childhood memories are of my Mum and I sitting in front of the tele in the ‘70s, watching the Morcambe and Wise Show which we both loved. She would literally cry with laughter at their routines. I tracked down and played this song at her funeral in 2006, so I’m playing it again for her now. Their impish joy is still irresistible - timeless comedy and music beats philosophy any day! Trust me, I’m a Doctor…of Philosophy ;-)

In between gigs across Australia, I have somehow managed to find the time to finalise and now publish the program for the Cosmic Frequencies Festival 2026 in Hexham, Northumberland UK!

This one-of-a-kind festival runs from 7-9 August 2019, and you can check out the amazing array of speakers and events lined up so far on our website.

Cosmic Frequencies is a new grassroots festival that explores astrophysics, UFOs, sci-fi and music, asking the question ‘Are we alone in the Universe?’ We are enthusiastic about space science, UFOs/ UAPs and art, and how the frontiers of knowledge expand when science meets fiction. Our DIY inaugural festival in August 2025 was a stellar success and our 2026 Festival program is twice as big, including a mini film festival!

“We” is a team of three volunteers (including myself), and I’ll be heading back to the UK on the 2^nd week of June to help set things up and add more Cosmic Frequencies events in and around Hexham for people to enjoy.

The core program features an amazing array of speakers who are internationally renowned in their respective fields including SETI astrophysicist Dr Beatriz Villarroel, award winning UFO podcaster Ryan Sprague, aviation historian & Foo Fighter researcher Graeme Cameron, former BBC science factual executive producer Steve Crabtree and more. You can read short bios about all our participants (including artists and musicians) on our Explorers page. Tickets for all sessions are also available on our website.

My deep dive into Chris Bledsoe’s orb footage

I have spent the last 3 days immersed in the Wunder Kabinet (wonder cabinet – cabinet of curiosities ) that I found by downloading and clicking frame by frame through a couple of the high definition reels of orbs that Chris Bledsoe posted on his Instagram page late last week.

I felt the best way to share my impressions and thoughts about what I was seeing was to select a handful of the dozens of stills I took from my very slow video journey, and incorporate them into a short (6 min) video with commentary which you can see above.

The music I’ve used is one of my favourite tracks from B(if)tek’s third and final album Frequencies Will Move Together. The title “Scatter Frost Like Ashes” is a beautiful phrase I remember we found by opening The Bible at random.

While neither Kate nor myself are adherents to any particular religion, the title seemed to resonate perfectly with the mystical longing that the track evokes. A woman’s voice sings in an almost pleading voice “Ich liebe dich” – “I love you” - over and over again.

I know not everyone (maybe no-one!) will agree with my interpretation of the images and I’m not trying to persuade anyone as to their objective truth.

Pareidolia is the human tendency to perceive meaningful images, such as faces or animals, within random or ambiguous visual patterns, like clouds, rock formations, or everyday objects.

However, when it comes to ‘supernatural’ phenomena, perhaps finding meaning is the while point. Particularly if you are open – as I am – to the possibility that the orbs might be carrying a form of love letters from ‘the other side’.

I have assumed, as Chris kindly posted the raw orb footage publicly on his Instagram page, and anyone on the internet can record from the screen, that the videos are in the public domain. Nevertheless, I’ll message Chris after I post this to thank him for his repeated pleas for peace, respecting ‘feminine energy’ and sharing his extraordinary footage and life story. He may or may not wish to comment on my video.

Let’s all remember to say Ich liebe dich as often as we can, in these perilous times!

Cosmic gambles

In his Medium post of 24 November, Professor Avi Loeb reported that he and Dr Michael Shermer had slammed down $1000 greenbacks on the following bet:

Discovery or disclosure of alien visitation to Earth in the form of UFOs, UAPs, or any other technological artifact or alien biological form, as confirmed by major scientific institutions and government agencies, will not happen by December 31, 2030.

Given Loeb earns his money as the outspoken head of Harvard’s Galileo Project for the Systematic Scientific Search for Evidence of Extraterrestrial Technological Artefacts, and Shermer, as the publisher of Skeptic magazine ‘debunks’ weird stuff for a living, you know what outcome each are hoping for.

The criteria for deciding this “extraterrestrial wager” as Loeb describes it, is as follows:

By Dec 31st 02030, at least two of these three scientific organizations — NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the American Astronomical Society — will affirm that discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence in the form of UAPs, UFOs, or any other interstellar objects that are determined to be ETI technological in nature, or any alien biological life form found here on Earth, has been made.

Loeb then lists some interesting bets made between high profile intellectuals and scientists over the decades, including a 1998 gamble between neuroscientist Christof Koch and philosopher David Chalmers: that the Hard Problem of Consciousness (a term coined by Chalmers) would be solved in 25 years. Chalmers won. Given neuroscientists still haven’t figured out how the brain’s neurons produce consciousness, and almost certainly never will, Chalmers should have bet way more than a case of wine on that slam dunk.

Although Loeb doesn’t list it, another high profile wager with consciousness implications was made between two high profile biologists, Dr Rupert Sheldrake and Professor Lewis Wolpert in 2009.

Wolpert is apparently confident that by May 1 2029, a scientist scrutinising the genome of a fertilised egg of an animal or plant “will be able to predict, in at least one case. all the details of the organism that develops from it, including abnormalities”. Sheldrake has a more complex view on how life forms, including the enmeshment of biology with wider energy fields and non-local consciousness.

Once again though, the booty stakes are piffling compared to the existential ones: the loser only has to shell out for a mere case of fine port. Given Sheldrake holds all the transcendental cards here, he could confidently have bet all the house money in Casino Royale.

So you might think, as I sipped my martini (shaken not stirred) in the cosmic casino, I’d pile my chips sky-high on the Loeb number. But thanks to my infra-red sunglasses, I’ve spotted the trap in the Loeb/ Shermer bet: it’s all about confirming “extraterrestrial intelligence” as evidenced by their “technology” or “alien biological life” on Earth.

You don’t need to have slid down the UFO rabbithole for very long to realise there is no agreement at all in either the intellectual or experiencer/contactee spheres (these often overlap) on what exactly UFOs actually are, or what the hell is that ‘Non Human Intelligence’ that’s doing all that communicating and weird shit.

Some are convinced (like the lovely remote viewer Birdie Jaworski or the members of the equally adorable Aetherius Society) they are in contact with beings from other planets. Some, like Chris Bledsoe, believe they are in contact with transcendental beings from divine realms. Others (like Whitley Strieber and Graeme Cameron in their latest conversation Why Do UFOs Cause Paranormal Events?) are not at all sure that there are hard and fast boundaries between the physical and the human on the one hand, and the transcendental and ‘alien’ on the other. Via one route or another, many UFO people find themselves in a face-off with the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Which, as noted above, isn’t going to be boxed, gift-wrapped and and left under a tree by a scientist Santa, anytime soon!

My cosmic bet

So I’d like to replace the Loeb/ Shermer bet with the following:

“By Dec 31st 2030, 20% of people living in the UK will have seen a UFO/something in the sky they could not explain and 30% will have had a ghostly or extraordinary experience. This will be confirmed by a survey conducted by IPSOS or another international market research company of similar credibility.”

This one’s a sure fire winner because a national survey conducted this year by IPSOS, funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council and The Folklore Society, found that 10% of respondents had seen a UFO/ unexplained aerial object and 16% had had ghostly/ paranormal experiences. I figure, given the zeitgeist, the only way is UP with these stats, so doubling in 5 years seems like a cinch.

The only wee problem with my bold-but-safe bet is who is going to take me on?

Not Shermer, who seems to discount people’s so-called ‘paranormal’ experiences on principle – apparently (sadly) even his own.

Professor Jeffrey Kripal in The Flip recounts a moving story shared by Shermer, where an old dead radio miraculously started playing “a romantic love song at exactly the right moment in order to convince his (Shermer’s) fiancée and soon to be wife (they were getting married within minutes in the same house) that her beloved grandfather was present for the ceremony”. “America’s most famous skeptic” found his “skepticism (shaken) to the core” (Shermer’s words).

But after a while, Shermer resumed his professional debunking career, as this experience, like most ‘paranormal’ experiences, are charged with meaning and human emotion, which are supposed to be excluded from conventional scientific methods. Even more awkward, there are groups of intellectuals and scientists who are skeptical of professional skeptics like Shermer, whom they regard as pseudoskeptics because they are committed to (usually unexamined) metaphysical belief systems such as physicalism (ie reality is solely comprised of dumb matter which only spurted out human consciousness by some weird fluke of evolutionary complexity), dismissing any evidence as ‘unscientific’ that challenges those beliefs.

Full Disclosure

However, the much hyped Age of Disclosure documentary that streamed worldwide on Wed 21 Nov largely didn’t risk boring Netflix viewers with bigger metaphysical questions. From the glossy dramatic trailers, the doco promised a‘shock and awe’ blockbuster style story and it did not disappoint. The film draws extensively on former spy Luis Elizondo’s Imminent book, stars Elizondo as the main narrator, and features mostly American military and intelligence whistle-blowers whose stories have already featured in Congressional hearings, podcasts, books, videos etc.

Nevertheless, like thousands of UFO enthusiasts across the globe, I marked the occasion by having friends over for a ‘watch party’ and I prepared my guests for a heavy dose of American exceptionalism by devising a drinking game.

The idea was, every time someone in the doco said “The American people demand/ are ready for/ need to know etc…The Truth”, we were to down a shot. However, if the name of my first band came up - Area 51 – then two shots would mark the happy event.

As you can see from the above tally-sheet, “American people….the Truth” kept on giving, scoring 11 mentions, but despite the fact that we were a cute, all girl, indie-dance crossover band with a significant following in 1990s Canberra, Area 51 - mystifyingly - only got one mention.

The next day, I was trawling through my emails (nursing a huge hangover) when I spotted a message from the indefatigable asking his followers for short audio reviews of The Age of Disclosure. I submitted a rant, which he included in a very entertaining compilation which you can listen to at your leisure here. (And I strongly encourage you to join me in becoming a Patreon supporter of Ryan, his Somewhere in The Skies work is truly outstanding!).

It’s official: 31/ATLAS Jilts Earth! Or has it?

But now back to Professor Loeb and that giant UFO currently in our galactic backyard. In my previous post and the one before that, I have been following Avi’s (and others’) speculations about the enormous inter-stellar mystery object known as 31/ATLAS.

A few days ago, Avi broke the heart-breaking news to everyone with the headline: 31/ATLAS Ignores Earth. Apparently when the strange comet/ possible alien probe “reached its closest distance from Earth, 268.91 million kilometres” on 19 December, it “did not maneuver or display any unusual activity on that occasion.”

Instead, 3I/ATLAS has apparently taken all 14 of is spectacular ‘no natural comet has ever displayed this thing’ anomalies – including its ostentatious half a million kilometre long sunwards facing anti-tail, off to a rendezvous with Jupiter, apparently not even slackening its frantic 241,000 kilometres per hour pace to glance our way.

Like any priest trying to comfort a jilted bride, Loeb explains the whole situation from God’s point of view:

the journey of 3I/ATLAS through the Milky-Way disk of stars must have taken billions of years. When 3I/ATLAS started its journey, there were no humans on Earth. And besides, among the solar system planets — Jupiter is the center of attention given that its mass is 318 times larger than Earth’s.

Humans arrived late to the local cosmic party, only to witness the last 0.0001 of the Milky-Way history. Given that, we should not be surprised that interstellar visitors — who attended the party for much longer, did not plan to dance with us.

So Jupiter is more attractive than Earth, because she is such an attention seeking big old Diva? How’s that supposed to make us feel any better??

Yet, I comfort myself by reflecting that Loeb seems to have more in common with his arch-nemesis Shermer than either of them would probably recognise.

For example, both buy into the equation: (higher) intelligence on other planets equals (bigger, faster, better) metallic technology, like spaceships. But this timely article summarises some of the latest intriguing research and thinking from astronomers and cosmologists that questions that equation:

We are finding exoplanets everywhere. Many are in the habitable zone. But if a planet is slightly larger than Earth, or has a different biological history, it might develop a thick, smothering atmosphere or a global ocean. It might be teeming with intelligent life — squid-philosophers or hive-mind insects — but without the ability to light a fire, they can never smelt metal. They can never build a steam engine. They can never build a radio

Maybe Birdie’s remote viewing sessions of 31/ATLAS were right: she describes cute furry microbe-like intelligences from a planet with a thick, hazy (but beautiful) atmosphere that somehow attached their life histories and profound learnings to the ancient inter-stellar traveller before they chose to become extinct. These gentle intelligences from a distant and long vanished planet didn’t use fire-forged technology as we understand it - they had apparently learned how to ‘harness the power of love’ . They wanted their peaceful messages to be carried through space forever.

How is any multi-million dollar telescope or space scanning device used by NASA, JPL, or indeed Avi’s Galileo Project, going to pick up those sorts of messages?

Birdie has spent decades cultivating extended sensory skills - you can call it consciousness technology or psychic if you want – hence, she got to experience the thrill of picking up the gentle people’s extraordinary story, she was welling up with tears of joy by the end of her RV sessions. So she’s not feeling jilted.

What if 31/ATLAS (or anything that has hitched a ride with it) was communicating symbolically? Carl Sagan speculated that math – pure symbol - was the most likely universal language, a theme he explored in his 1979 book Contact, later made into a 1997 film starring Jodie Foster. Much of Voyager 1’s instructions on the Golden Record are binary code/ math based. Symbols to be decoded.

But again, the assumption is that ETs have both the ability and desire to smelt their exotic metals into versions of groovy ‘70s turntables.

I of course sincerely hope aliens have decks, but what if symbolic messages from NHI aren’t transmitted electronically but performed?

A Dark Side of the Moon connection

A couple of weeks ago, I was tidying up my lounge room when I felt like listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, a classic album I hadn’t treated myself to for years. When I found my copy of the 2023 50^th anniversary vinyl reissue, I noticed there were posters included in that edition which I’d forgotten about. One of them was a picture of the Giza pyramids, in purple (my favourite colour). On impulse, I scooted to the shops, bought a frame, and hung it up high in the listening corner of my lounge.

An hour later, I was back at the laptop checking out what else people were saying about 31/ATLAS on Medium, and I stumbled across David Sereda’s posts. Sereda is a nuclear physicist, geometry nerd, archeo-astronomy acolyte and religious symbolism junkie. As I trawled through his posts, I realised that Sereda had been riding high on all the math-based symbolism and messages he’d been busy decoding from 31/ATLAS’s movements and attributes for months. A lot of them were about connections with the Giza pyramids eg:

When we consider that 3I/Atlas demonstrated the 3 most important “Angles” in the ancient Egyptian world, as discussed in my previous article, 26° angle of it’s Jet tail -anti-tail — which is equivalent to the interior angle of slope inside the Great Pyramid’s ascending and descending passages, and that it would be at Great Pyramid slope angle to Earth (51.853972 °) on Christmas day 2025, December 25, and at the complimentary angle of Resurrection 90° — 51.853972° = 38.146028° — how did the Ancient Egyptians mark their calendar year? It was Sirius Heliacal Rising, which is when the star Sirius returns to the position of rising just before the sun rises on a specific day each year at Giza (Jeezah).

So David, like Birdie, is feeling very wooed, not jilted, by 31/ATLAS.

And I also get the pleasure of feeling cosmic connectedness, when I look at my classic ‘70s progressive space-rock poster and remember the little synchronicity surrounding its re-discovery.

The Professor and The Remote Viewer: a romantic twist?

After I wrote all the above, I just caught up on Loeb’s post of three days ago. It’s ostensibly all about The Golden Record, and on-brand for promoting why ancient alien probes, the main focus of his Galileo SETI Project, could be a thing. But as it goes on, I’m starting to wonder if the Professor might have been taking a naughty peek at Birdie’s channel, although he’d never admit it in public. He writes that in contrast to the Voyager 1 probe:

.. the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS has an outward speed of 60 kilometers per second. It will return to interstellar space in about 8,000 years. Riding 3I/ATLAS offers the benefit of reaching interstellar space by the year ~10,000 CE instead of the year ~30,000 CE.

The discovery of interstellar objects over the past decade offers new opportunities for humanity to send time capsules to interstellar space.

One approach would be to design interceptor missions that would deposit analogs of the Voyager’s Golden Records on the surface of a large interstellar object like 3I/ATLAS, with the hope that these records will be recognized by interstellar archaeologists. Another approach is to use a high-power laser beam to engrave a message on the dry surface of an interstellar asteroid.

Hmmm, isn’t that what a nice bee-keeping, banjo loving woman in the New Mexico desert picked up about a mystery target (a set of math co-ordinates) she was given way back in July to remote view? That something ‘like a comet…but not a comet’ was carrying the records of a long-gone race of gentle beings who wanted interstellar strangers to remember them? The big difference of course, is that the “interceptor mission” of these cosmic Naugas was apparently powered by love, not technology as we know it, Jim.

Anyway, I’ll certainly always remember the 3I/ATLAS hitchhiker’s wonderful story (which I choose to believe is true because it makes me feel so good!), especially whenever I immerse myself in one of the finest records ever shot into inner space, Dark Side of The Moon.

Subscribe now

According to Professor Avi Loeb’s Medium post of six days ago titled First Radio Signal from 3I/ATLAS:

MeerKAT, a radio telescope with a diameter of 13.5 meters operated by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory, detected radio absorption lines by hydroxyl radicals, namely OH molecules, from the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS. The report by D.J. Pisano and collaborators was posted on The Astronomer’s Telegram here.

Now of course, news of a “radio transmission” is just what cosmologically inclined musicians such as myself have been dying to hear ever since the ATLAS telescope in Chile detected the giant interstellar galactic visitor popping into our solar system on 1^st July and skating along with uncanny accuracy towards Earth’s ecliptic plane.

As I mentioned in my last post, a scuffle has since broken out in the astronomy/ astrophysics world between the apparent majority who insist (publicly at least) that this is nothing but another “natural comet”, and a minority, led by Professor Loeb from the Galileo SETI Project who is “warning” everyone it could be “technological”.

Professor Loeb has been kind of having his space-cake and eating it by saying on the one hand, the massive mystery object (apparently 5 km across at least) is most likely “a natural comet” but then toting up all the anomalies (which seem to be increasing every few days) that indicate its behaviours and properties are nothing like any ‘comet’ we’ve seen before, and suggestive of ‘artificial’ design and purpose. Loeb has been warning anyone who will listen that the world would be wise to consider and prepare for “unwanted Christmas presents” from a possible mothership of alien technological origin. Christmas time is significant, because apparently on 19^th December 3I/ATLAS will get closest to Earth, allowing ground-based telescopes as well as the Hubble and Webb space telescope to ascertain more accurate measurements of its composition, mass etc

At the moment, Loeb seems to be ahead in the science communications popularity stakes (I’ll come back to that later). But first, I want to go back to the information about 3I/ATLAS picked up by Birdie Jaworski (a professional remote viewer with 30 years experience), in the three apparently blind (ie numerical correlates only) hour long RV sessions she did on 31 July ie before the controversy over the mystery celestial object hit public consciousness via mainstream media news reports. You can find these on her YouTube Channel.

As I noted in my previous post, 3I/ATLAS seems to be currently acting as a celestial mirror of commentators’ world views, reflecting back to us our hopes and fears, inviting all who gaze upon its blurry, enigmatic image to scuttle around the limits of our imaginations. So here are a few things Birdie’s psychic intel picked up about ATLAS that I most certainly want to be true, and I have solid data vis space-themed dance music references to back me up.

1. 3I/ATLAS is the last home of the “gentle people”

Birdie’s sessions (which she recorded in real time) reveal the story of an ancient race of “highly intelligent, peaceful, kind” beings on a distant planet, who a long time ago, decided collectively to end their species as some problem had developed over time with their ability to reproduce. Although they had developed a kind of bio-tech to keep themselves going, they eventually decided this wasn’t the direction they wanted to keep going in “they didn’t like the stories they were now creating”. Somehow they managed to record a three dimensional archive of the lives/ consciousness of everyone then still alive and attach it to this huge, ancient inter-stellar travelling object that was apparently well known to them. They did this so all other beings following them in space-time who encountered the object would learn from their experiences and remember them.

Birdie draws these beings as very small, round, sort of furry, pinkish with sort of spiky ‘arms’ coming out. I immediately saw the correlation between these gentle alien beings and The Gentle People, a groovy US/ UK space-disco-lounge outfit that rose to fame in the late ‘90s club scene: it’s visionary founder, the adorable Dougee Dimensional, is still one of my best friends.

The Gentle People’s mascot is a ‘cute 60s/’70s Nauga toy that even looks like ATLAS’s remembered occupants. Just a coincidence? Ok, that just shows a correlation not necessarily a causation but still…

2. ATLAS is “an echo” bringing messages of love

Throughout her three remote viewing sessions, Birdie often struggles with translating what she is picking up into familiar human terms eg the beings are/were/ had become “biotech…no that’s not right…its more organic” “they uploaded their history and memories (to 31/ATLAS)…no uploaded isn’t the right term..” “it’s a natural object…like a comet…” but its “lonely” and it’s “an echo”. Towards the middle of the third session, she struggles with understanding the technology of this gentle, vanished race that somehow enabled their memories to be attached to this giant rock hurtling through space-time, then realises that it is “love. Their engines are powered by love”.

3. ATLAS is “the Traveller”

By the end of the third session, Birdie is no longer describing the mystery interstellar object as a comet, but has given it an evocative name: the Traveller.

Most of Birdie’s sessions are devoted to trying to understand the intelligence that she can ‘see’ is only a tiny part that has attached itself to the giant Traveller. But I’d like to hang on to my amateur remote viewing glowsticks in the dark transdimensional disco for now, and I still have a hunch that the Traveller is ‘natural’ but it has a purpose of movement and intent that we would normally associate with a technological artefact, such as a spacecraft or probe.

What if the Traveller is in our solar system because it is “naturally” responding to a “natural” distress call from living planets (such as Earth) across space-time, and it’s gentle, wise hitchhikers (who according to Birdie, had a different – longer, “chunk-like” experience of time to humans) somehow knew this is what it did?

Avi Loeb is making much of the fact that the two other interstellar objects that have suddenly appeared in our solar system in recent years (1I/Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov), may well have been “alien probes”. But 3I/ATLAS is not only apparently a million times bigger than 1I/Oumuamua, it’s also coming a lot closer to Earth. Maybe therefore 3I/ATLAS is large enough, ancient enough and predictable enough to be the right ‘vehicle’ if you wanted to hitch an interstellar ride to conscious planets on the brink of destruction (or find that restaurant at the end of the Universe)?

The PR War of the SETI Worlds

Meanwhile, back on the physical plane. Avi doesn’t appear to be thinking much about immanent biosphere collapse on our planet or desperately hoping Non Human Intelligence from other planets might quickly show us how to power engines with love rather than fossil fuels. His controversial speculations about the potential dangers posed by an alien mothership/ probe might be irking more cautious astronomers and SETI colleagues, but they are exciting the imaginations (and wallets) of common folk and billionaires alike: Loeb has been eagerly sharing pictures of a NASCAR race car now featuring his image:

And private investors gave him the capital to build a brand new Galileo Project observatory on top of the Las Vegas Sphere (a $2.3 billion LED-soaked monument to spectacle entertainment that allegedly gulps enough electricity to power 21,000 homes on a peak day).

Avi also scored a spot on Joe Rogan’s (disturbingly) massively popular podcast although Rogan, a climate change denier, is not a fan of science or any facts in general that he doesn’t like.

It’s interesting to compare the personalities and operating style of this senior male, American Harvard professor, with that of young, female Swedish astrophysicist Dr Beatriz Villarroel.

When we spoke on the phone in the days before her scheduled talk at the Cosmic Frequencies Festival (I had invited Beatriz to speak and she had graciously agreed months earlier), her pre-pub (pre-publication) papers had just gone viral on UFO-related social and news outlets. Her papers showed the results of her team’s examination of astronomical photographic plates taken before 1957, when the first human made satellite Sputnik was launched. In two related studies she found “thousands” of objects in geosynchronous orbit around the earth that appeared, then disappeared, whose appearance and behaviour looked technological rather than natural. More than that, she also discovered a statistical link between the appearance of these objects with the dates of US nuclear weapons tests and the famous Washington UFO flap in 1951. When I asked her how she was feeling at the electric reception to her papers, she responded in a fragile voice: “I’m scared”.

Beatriz was scared in two deep ways: first, she has absorbing the ‘ontological shock’ her research’s implications: “We are not alone!” she whispered. The second discomfort was having to assume an emotional bracing position to withstand what she assumed would be a cultural/ epistemological backlash from the astrophysics community which would ensure her controversial papers wouldn’t pass peer review and be published in academic journals. Over the next couple of days, Beatriz’s voice became weaker with anxiety, stress and illness, resulting in a bad case of COVID which prevented her from attending our fun science+SETI+art festival at the last minute. Nevertheless, she propped herself up in her Stockholm apartment bed and, after several attempts, managed to summon enough voice and energy to pre-record her presentation, which we showed to an awestruck cinema audience as part of the main event of festival talks that weekend. Beatriz repeatedly apologised to me and insisted how much she had looked forward to coming to the little Northern UK town of Hexham to have a good time. I know that she meant it, because I later found out she had expressed the same sentiments to other people.

And yet, contrary to expectations, in early October the news broke that Beatriz’s papers had passed peer review and were to be accepted in high impact astrophysics journals (links to the published papers here). This was surely science paradigm shift territory - the first peer reviewed astrophysics studies to offer evidence of seemingly technological objects orbiting the earth in the early 1950s that were not put there by 20^th century humans. In other words, UFOs. In this hour and a half long video, Villarroel discusses her papers and their possible implications with Dr Garry Nolan.

I, like thousands – probably hundreds of thousands around the world rejoiced at this brave young woman’s achievement. And I was particularly relieved that she had been vindicated and all the stress caused by human reactions (not ‘aliens’) was going to be lifted. Since then, she was the opening speaker for the 3^rd annual Sol Symposium (in Italy this year, I had a ball attending the 2^nd in San Francisco last year), and she has since been interviewed on mainstream news outlets (in the US at least). I’ve seen snippets of her interviews, and she maintains the same soft-spoken, humble, excited but cautious way of talking about her research to millions of viewers that she uses with her friends and supporters.

Both Professor Loeb and Dr Villarroel are on the Sol Foundation advisory board. I’ve been reading Avi’s Medium feed daily, expecting to see Beatriz’s research and academic achievement acknowledged, at least in passing. They both, after all, share the same hypothesis, that intelligent beings on the billions of other planets in the billions of other solar systems we know are out there could have evolved billions of years before our relatively young Sun. By sheer random cosmic luck, freewheeling microbial life sprang up on Earth around 3.5 billion years, much needier homo sapiens only a few thousand years ago, and we’ve rotated around our teenage solar Mum ever since. Those ancient beings could have sent out probes – like we did with Voyager in 1977 - to explore other star systems. Those ancient ‘alien artefacts’ would have had plenty of time to get here by now. I could be wrong, I can’t possibly keep up with all The Professor’s media appearances where he might have referenced his female colleague’s research, but no mention so far on his daily Medium posts.

Unfortunately, there are signs that Avi, like a cow under a UFO tractor beam, may be dangerously dazzled by the bright SETI celebrity searchlight he has attracted. Recently, word has been getting out about alleged rude behaviour to some thoughtful grassroots UFO podcasters like the lovely Ryan Sprague (now fellow crew member of the Cosmic Frequencies production team) and Ty Roberts, both of whom had previously held the Professor in high regard and actively promoted his work. They still respect his research but no longer want to interview him.

Never a good idea to forget the little people who made you! Especially if the NHI tech associated with 3I/ATLAS turns out to be made by very tiny people indeed.

“Imagine that you could get more music coming to us!”

In an interview Beatriz did with Ryan Sprague last year, he asked her what she hoped an ‘alien’ contact would bring to Earth. She responded immediately, enthusiastically, that she wished that other beings would bring amazing, beautiful art and music that would “enrich us culturally”.

That is the gist of the whole story the SKX Funkanaut’s have woven around their music. These fantastic Hexham space-funksters are the captains of the Cosmic Frequencies festival, and they incorporated Beatriz’s interview words in a track they performed live at Cosmic Frequencies 2025 as a tribute to her work and inspiration. Beatriz has indicated how much she wants to join us for the 2026 Festival (7-9 August), hopefully both health and her now very busy schedule will permit her to pack her violin and make it over to Blighty this time.

In contrast, Loeb continues to lean on NASA/ the UN/his astronomer colleagues with the threat narrative – this ‘comet but not a comet’ thing COULD be alien technology therefore a DANGER to humanity, all the while smiling to cameras with happy enthusiasm. THREAT is certainly the easiest way to attract media attention. But why isn’t Beatriz’s ‘cultural enrichment’ narrative equally plausible?

I’m with Birdie and Beatriz’s dreams. And I think they’re the safest dreams to have. If, for example, positive human emotions intentionally beamed across large distances to a very lucky tree can measurably enhance its vitality compared to a control group of less adored trees (according to neuro-cardiology researchers at The Heart Math Institute), then maybe the wisest strategy we could take on 19^th December is to try beaming up those good ole happy vibes to the the Traveller. I for one will already be armed with a cracking space-disco-funk playlist ready for the cosmic occasion!

On 1^st July this year, the ATLAS Survey telescope in Chile spotted an unusual object in our galaxy hurtling towards our sun. This was quickly confirmed to be of interstellar origin, apparently only the third such officially confirmed deep space visitor to our solar system, hence the nomenclature 3I: 3^rd Interstellar.

As 3I/ATLAS has been serenely speeding ever closer to us at a clipping pace of over 200,000 km per hour, the fact that no-one knows yet just what this gigantic object (currently estimated at 5 kms in diameter) is, or exactly where it came from, has ignited a high stakes debate in the astronomy/ astrophysics community that is unfolding like a gripping sci-fi drama in real time.

Since the news of the mystery object broke, most astronomers commenting in the public domain are favouring “natural” explanations:- it’s just another comet, a rock from another part of the Milky Way on a random joy-ride through our neighbourhood. But Professor Avi Loeb, head of The Galileo Project for the Systematic Scientific Search for Evidence of Technological Artefacts, has been adding rocket fuel to the debate with a White Paper submission to the UN in September warning of potential “threats to humanity” if such a strange interstellar object were to carry “alien technology”, followed by the Interplanetary Asteroid Warning Network announcing on October 1^st a worldwide campaign to study this strange space tourist.

Loeb has a free Medium feed where he shares daily (sometimes twice a day) his analysis of the latest data on 3I/ATLAS coming through from an international array of terrestrial and space based observation platforms. Up to now, Loeb has not been disagreeing with conventional astronomical explanations, stating that “3I/Atlas is most likely a comet of natural origin”, but also gleefully toting more and more anomalies (which just clocked up to 9 yesterday) that suggest it isn’t. Anomalies that when you do the math, according to Loeb, add up to “a cumulative likelihood lower than a part in ten quadrillion (10^{16}).” Ie: the space statistics betting shop is tipping steadily towards ‘alien tech’ as favourite.

A couple of days ago (October 29^th), 3I/ATLAS got to perihelion, its closest distance (203 million kilometres) from our sun, completing half of its journey through the Solar System. Loeb has been posting (and telling any news outlet or podcaster who will listen) that “for a spacecraft, perihelion is the optimal time for either acceleration or deceleration by an impulse from an engine, thanks to the gravitational assist from the Sun. This is also true of a mothership releasing mini-probes that maneuver towards the planets.” In other words, with the interstellar visitor now snuggled up behind the sun and (conveniently?) out of view of terrestrial telescopes, this might be when we see anomalous objects appear and start making their way towards Earth.

Apparently, NASA has in its possession the highest resolution images of the mystery comet or mothership, taken from the HiRise camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on 2-3 October, which have yet to be released to the public and wider scientific community. Yesterday, at Loeb’s public prompting, Representative Anna Paulina Luna (currently the most vocal and definitely most appropriately named politician advocating for UAP disclosure legislation in the US Congress), sent a letter to NASA requesting these images and any other unreleased data relating to 3I/Atlas (as well as historical data on possible “interstellar meteors” from the Jet Propulsion Laboratories) be made available for scientific scrutiny.

A tetchy UK vs USA ‘space-off’

Insufficient/ missing data at this critical juncture in the space drama, however, apparently didn’t stop popular British science factual TV star Professor Brian Cox from pronouncing that 3I/ATLAS was “definitely a natural comet”, prompting this immediate slap-down from Loeb today, quoted below in full:

I explained (to reporters) that Brian Cox did not write a single scientific paper about 3I/ATLAS. He acts as a science popularizer rather than a researcher who is engaged with the related science concerning 3I/ATLAS. In comparison, I wrote 11 scientific papers in recent months about 3I/ATLAS (accessible here). Rather than engage in sweeping statements, Brian should be challenged to explain the 9 anomalies associated with 3I/ATLAS (with 8 anomalies compiled here and the 9th anomaly being its unprecedented recent brightening while being bluer than the Sun, discussed here). Scientific truth is not decided by a popularity contest but by attention to data — especially when it is anomalous.

Ouch!

But Professor Loeb is being a tad disingenuous when he claims “scientific truth is not decided by a popularity contest” while at the same time he is masterfully cultivating and riding a wave of popular support in the US to get the scientific data he wants from official space agencies. Good looking Brian’s pre-particle physicist life as keyboardist in ‘90s Brit-dance-pop bands might help him popularise his cosmology lessons to the UK public, but he’s no match to nerdy but impish Loeb’s growing ‘New Carl Sagan’ aura in the US.

Needless to say, the interwebs has been swirling with enjoyable UFO-logy related speculation on just what 3I/ATLAS is. As the above public tiff between Brian and Avi shows very well, what people think this giant UFO is very much reflects what knowledge bases and worldviews individuals are drawing on, and also want they want/ hope it will be.

So I thought I’d better jump on the 3I/ATLAS meme space-wagon before NASA and JPL clear the mystery up (with or without the smudging out of weird looking bits that some UFOlogists argue can be detected in earlier NASA/ JPL Mars and Lunar images), and ruin the fun for the rest of us.

My top three guesses at what 31/Atlas will turn out to be:

1. A giant interstellar manifestation of the Temple of Initiation from the 1973 arthouse animation cult classic film Fantastic Planet. When 3I/Atlas hits perihelion, the probes that are ejected will be the Consciousness Orbs, except the images in those Orbs that float out into space won’t be of Draag heads but mostly, if not entirely, Avi Loeb’s gleeful face, an expression he consistently wears even when warning of an alien “Trojan Horse”, disguised as a comet, that could wipe out humanity.

2. The Liberator, alien-tech spacecraft from legendary BBC noir-sci-fi TV series Blake’s 7 (1978-1981). It is now captained by both Avon and Servalan who have freely admitted their previously sublimated passionate love for each and have united to free earth from the tyranny of the Terran Federation (ie post-Thatcherite fascism). The Liberator probes are actually replicas of London’s 1980s New Romantic era Blitz club, which systematically land on, and stylishly replace, every nuclear weapons base across the globe.

3. A wondrous thing that proves that absolutely everyone was actually right no matter how divergent their perspectives! So that would have to be a naturally produced rocky/metallic comet-like thing that is naturally technologically sophisticated (in the way that we sometimes regard our bodies as machines or computers) and naturally intelligent, including intelligent in a cosmic symbolic sense. ‘Nature’, as richly demonstrated by Rice University’s Archives of The Impossible, doesn’t seem to be particularly constrained by what humans think it can or can’t do.

I think an 31/ATLAS that had all those attributes would keep most people happy.

I’d personally like it even more if it also displayed a great sense of fun: for example, initially, ATLAS will look like it hasn’t released any probes at all. But it has! In a few weeks time, Brian Cox will be sipping his morning coffee, looking out the window into his Battersea back garden, and a little flying saucer will descend gently, play the theme music to his latest BBC TV docuseries Solar System – then instantaneously vanish!

As it turns out, my latter speculation does share some similarities with remote viewer Birdie Jaworski’s cosmic intel. Birdie’s live recordings of her remote viewing sessions on blind targets (ie she apparently doesn’t know what she has been asked to ‘see’) are always fascinating. Her impressions of 31/Atlas developed in complexity over 3 sessions, recorded three weeks ago, which you can watch on her YouTube Channel.

My next adventures

After a truly sensational gig in Melbourne a couple of weeks ago, I’ll be taking my old skool electronic dance show on the road in cities across Australia early in 2025, following a NYE performance at a groovy local festival (deets to be announced soon on my Insta account). And I am starting to work with fellow crew members to get the Cosmic Frequencies 2026 Festival program organised and ready for lift-off in Hexham UK in August next year. Already some amazing people and organisations are approaching us to be involved, so I’ll keep y’all updated on this platform as that progresses over the coming months. Stay tuned!

Pigeons in Flight!

On Friday 24^th July, Bill Garrett and I arrived at the Deershed Festival in Baldersby Park, North Yorkshire. I’d had a great time there last year, it was my kind of UK music festival – small, groovy line-up, family friendly relaxed vibe in a gorgeous rural setting - and Bill had kindly bought me tickets as an early birthday present.

But when we got there, we were both already exhausted from the work involved in getting the inaugural Cosmic Frequencies Festival organised and promoted. We were doing everything on no budget with just a crew of three (myself, Bill and Michael Evans from the S.K.X. Funkanauts) including sorting out all the technical requirements, borrowing (and sometimes buying) equipment, preparing our own talks and rehearsing performances, meeting with the Rector of Hexham Abbey, filming and cutting videos, running around town asking shops to put up posters and flyers (which many did!)

And we still had loads more to do with the festival only two weeks away. We had seriously considered not going, but we were both super-fans of John Shuttleworth – the genius ‘90s creation of multitalented British comedian and musician Graham Fellows.

Shuttleworth is an out of date Northern bloke with slicked hair, unfashionable glasses, brown vinyl jacket and beige slacks who is a whiz on the early ‘80s keyboard synthesiser the Yamaha PSS51. Deftly poking dinky rhythm section pre-sets for accompaniment, John cheerily croons songs about the mundane dilemmas and triumphs of frozen in time suburban Northern life, such as pride in owning a 1982 Austin Ambassador (Y Reg) model car, why his wife would thoughtlessly open a second tub of margarine when they hadn’t finished the first one, and the tragedy of being offered a second helping of shepherd’s pie when he’d already started on desert (I recorded a snippet of this latter gem ‘I Can’t Go Back to Savoury Now’ that evening at Deer Shed):

Shuttleworth/ Fellow’s set in the Big Top tent that evening was a feel-good comedy muzak tour de force. The packed crowd gleefully sang along with every song, but what amazed me most was how a row of kids sitting next to us right at the front, who could not have been older than 10, knew every word of every song! So much for cultural generation gaps!

A week or so before the festival, Bill said he couldn’t see Shuttleworth listed on the program anymore. This prompted me to email Fellows to ask if ‘John’ was going to appear or not as he was the main attraction as far as I was concerned. When Fellows kindly got back to me - a random stranger- immediately in the affirmative, I expressed my gratitude saying that I would be the “short, weird girl in the front row screaming Pigeons in Flight! for an encore”. Pigeons in Flight is my favourite Shuttleworth anthem– a gushing Eurovision song contest entry parody that rivals the syrupy surreal heights reached by Father Ted and Dougal in My Lovely Horse. Imagine my surprise and delight when he announced the end of his set but then launched into the opening strains of Pigeons: as prophesied, I responded by launching myself in front of the stage, waving my arms and singing the yearning lyrics “Pigeons in flight, I want to see you tonight!” with the same hoarse enthusiasm as the 10 year olds next to me.

I was too excited and enjoying the moment to take any video of Shuttleworth’s soaring finale (which I flattered myself might have had something to do with my email!). But as we left the tent in the fading light and starting trudging back to the campground, my short burst of energy stopped as abruptly as a pigeon’s coo, and my mood drooped with fatigue and worry about whether our bird-brained idea for a UFO-themed science and arts festival in an obscure little Northern English town was destined to flop. Little did I know that, within a couple of hours, I’d be too excited by other flying objects in the sky to capture that moment too.

Unidentified Objects in Flight!

Although I dropped down the UFO rabbit hole in mid-2023, and have spent the last two years researching the Phenomenon via books, podcasts, videos and attending conferences, until that night 24 July 2025, I had never actually seen anything weird in the sky. So when Bill and I saw one or maybe four anomalous flying luminous objects performing strange maneuvers high overhead that night, just when my enthusiasm for the subject was at its lowest ebb, I think I can be forgiven for taking that as a good omen for Cosmic Frequencies.

The wonderful Ryan Sprague, a prolific UFO researcher and media presenter, was one of the people I’d invited to speak at the Festival. A regular element of his Somewhere In The Skies podcast is ‘Witness Accounts’, which are compilations of first person stories about UFO experiences recorded and sent to him from people all around the world. When I emailed him excitedly after the festival to tell him about my first UFO sighting, he asked me to record my account and send it to him for his series. He kindly included it as the first story in Witness Accounts: Vol 37.

You can hear what happened by listening to the episode (and please subscribe to Ryan’s channel and consider supporting him on Patreon, he is an independent artist too, driven by passion and working very hard to stay afloat!). Bill and my shared experience was not as momentous/freaky as many of the close encounter stories Ryan (and others) document, but it was (obviously) of high significance to me. The only post-script I’ll add here, is that for several days later, I did spend hours scouring the net trying to find drone or any imagery that resembled one element of the sightings involving green lights. Eventually, I stumbled across this short Instagram post by a UK woman, who I contacted to find out where she captured this footage, but I never heard back. Here’s a screenshot:

Hexham – We Have Lift-off!

As hinted by the mysterious Baldersby Park light anomalies, Cosmic Frequencies turned into huge success that exceeded all our expectations.

I’m still (slowly but surely) catching up on lost sleep, so I’m just copying and pasting below from an article published this week in our local paper (The Hexham Courant) which gives you the gist of it, then heading to bed and the beloved land of nod after I post. I’ll just add that the festival included a packed sci-fi dress-up party and disco, talks on UFOs and Consciousness (by me) and The History of Special FX in film and TV (Bill), the major event of talks at The Forum Cinema was almost sold out, and the special screening of Spielberg’s 1977 classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind also drew a crowd, unheard of for mid-summer here where locals and tourists alike are either out enjoying country walks, knocking back pints in sunny beer gardens or trying to combine both.

I’ll share more interesting anecdotes about audience and presenter reactions to the festival (all positive!) in later posts, but for now, over to the venerable recorder of all things newsworthy round these parts, the Courant:

“Hexham’s Cosmic Frequencies Festival ‘a stellar first year’”

14 Aug

By Ewan Wishart The Hexham Courant 14 August 2025. Original article here.

HEXHAM's new space-themed festival is aiming for lift-off after a stellar first year.

The team behind Hexham’s first-ever Cosmic Frequencies weekend (August 8-10) said they were 'thrilled' by the turnout, and are already making ambitious plans for next year.

Highlights of the festival included immersive live sets, talks on UFOs and space science, interactive sessions, and cinematic experiences.

The three organisers: Hexham-based artist and curator Michael Evans, Australian-born musician and writer Nicole Skeltys, and former BBC special effects engineer Bill Garrett, pulled the two-day event together on a shoestring budget.

Cosmic Frequencies organisers (from left): Bill Garrett, Michael Evans, Nicole Skeltys with guest speaker Ryan Sprague.

Nicole said, "We had no budget; we just relied on the goodwill of the town. We reached out to very high-profile people, and they all agreed to come to this little town.

"They were very excited about the whole idea, and we realised we were onto something: a celebration of creativity and curiosity about space, and the existential question: are we alone in the universe?"

Held across multiple venues in Hexham, including The Forum, The Queen's Hall, The Tannery, and The Heart of Northumberland, the festival blended talks, music, and performance art, drawing audiences from Newcastle, Durham, and even the South of England.

Michael said one highlight was a talk by Ryan Sprague, a US-based podcaster and UFO researcher, which prompted an unexpected reaction from the crowd.

"Ryan asked how many people had seen something they couldn’t explain, and maybe 10 to 15 people put their hands up – probably more.

Ryan Sprague talking at Cosmic Frequencies festival about how UFO experiences change people’s lives (Photo: Rob Halliburton)

"That really surprised us. We want to pick up on that next year, and we’re asking anyone locally with a story to tell to get in touch."

For Michael, the aim is to cement Hexham’s place on the map for cosmic curiosity: "We want people coming from outside of the area for the festival; great speakers, artists, and musicians.

"This year, we've set the standard. We’ve had brilliant feedback from everybody. The aim is to establish Hexham as a go-to place for people interested in space."

Plans for 2026 include using more venues, securing funding, and expanding the programme.

"In the coming months, we’re going to be busy with grant applications. We’ve already made contact with a very supportive UK Arts Council representative, and we’ll settle on a date soon so we can start collaborating with anyone who wants to get on board," added Nicole.

Anyone from Hexham or the wider Tyne Valley with a UFO or unexplained encounter is encouraged to contact the Cosmic Frequencies team via mothership@cosmicfrequencies.org

It’s a three day festival in Hexham, Northumberland, UK called Cosmic Frequencies, a celebration of space science, UFOs and creativity featuring talks from astronomers, astrophysicists, UFO experiencers and artists (filmmakers and musicians) addressing the question “Are we alone in the Universe?”. I’m one of the producers, and here is the official press release:

NEW NORTH EAST FESTIVAL PUTS UK’S FIRST SEARCH BEAM ON UAPS, SCIENCE AND THE ARTS

The ancient market town of Hexham, Northumberland is about to play host to some of the world’s most influential speakers on the new science of UAP/ UFO research.

The Cosmic Frequencies Festival is the brainchild of Hexham space-funk band SKX Funkanauts, assisted by locals Dr Nicole Skeltys and Dr Bill Garrett who have keen interest in the topic of UAPs.

UAPs stands for Unidentified Anomalous/ Ariel Phenomenon which has replaced the more familiar UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) in international science and policy discussions.

“UAPs are a great mystery” explains Dr Skeltys.“No one discipline holds all the answers to what people globally are encountering in the skies and under the oceans, it is such a complex phenomenon.”

“So we decided to create a fun Festival where the general public has a chance to hear about the cutting edge of research in space science, but also bring in perspectives from other fields, particularly arts, music and philosophy.”

The Cosmic Frequencies team were delighted when Dr Beatriz Villarroel, an award winning Swedish astrophysicist who is a leading figure in the study of UAPs, accepted their invitation to participate in a night of talks at the Forum Cinema Hexham (7.00 pm 9th August) around the theme ‘Are we alone in the universe?’.

Among her many achievements, Dr Villarroel is co-author of a recent landmark paper on the New Science of UAPs in the high impact peer-reviewed journal Progress in Aerospace Sciences. She was also part of a large, international cross-disciplinary team of researchers who contributed to Professor Bohlander’s (from Durham University Law School) timely submission on SETI and UAP to the House of Lords Select Committee on UK Engagement with Space (June 2025).

Other speakers include best selling author, media presenter and researcher Ryan Sprague (USA) whose show Somewhere In The Skies is one of the longest running and influential UAP themed podcasts; Emmy nominated filmmaker Steve Crabtree, former BBC producer of Horizon and the Sky at Night; and Dan Pye, Director Astronomy and Science Communication at nearby Kielder Observatory.

The prototype Festival runs over three days (8-10) August across Hexham venues, including a sci-fi themed disco, talks on UFOs and Consciousness and Special Effects in Film and TV, and a special screening of Spielberg’s sci-fi classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

“It made sense to start a Festival celebrating cosmic mysteries here in Hexham which is right on the edge of Northumberland International Dark Skies Park, Kielder Observatory and the Museum of Classic Sci-Fi in Allendale.”

“Hexham has a great community spirit, consistently voted by RightMove as one of the top three happiest places to live in the UK. Locals are excited about the Festival which we hope to make an annual event, expanding our program and attracting more star-gazers from the UK and beyond each year.”

For more info and tickets, visit the Cosmic Frequencies website.

UFOs + Consciousness + Disco!

The festival kicks off in our favourite local watering hole The Tannery at 7.00 pm on Friday 8^th with a free sci-fi themed pub quiz, cosplay party and space disco. Saturday 9^th August another fine Hexham pub The Heart of Northumberland hosts two free talks: from 12.30, I lead a discussion on my favourite topic UFOs and Consciousness, followed by Dr Garrett at 3.00 taking folk on a journey behind the scenes through sci-fi special effects in film and TV. That evening in the Forum Cinema Hexham from 7.00, I’ll be co-hosting the night of talks by the incredible presenters described in the press release above, and on Sunday 10^th, the Forum provides the perfect festival wrap-up experience with a special screening of Spielberg’s contact classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Dashing off to the lovely Deer Shed festival in North Yorkshire now, I promise to write more soon!

In late 1985 Whitley Strieber, then a moderately successful American writer with a gift for horror fiction, was living in a cabin in up-state New York with his wife and young son. As a liberal/progressive intellectual with some immersion in 60s/ 70s counter-cultural ideas, Strieber was most preoccupied with climate change and ecosystem collapse, and not UFOs which he didn’t believe were real things, let alone any far-fetched stories of human contact with so-called aliens.

However, strange experiences had started to beset Whitley in the cabin, and from October he found himself becoming increasingly paranoid and unhinged. There was lost time he couldn’t couldn’t account for, there were terrifiying flashbacks with bizzare imagery. At a loss for what could be wrong with him, Whitley, at his wife’s urging, subjected himself to a barrage of medical, psychological and psychiatric tests, including MRIs looking for temporal lobe epilepsy. But all that was apparently physically wrong with him was some unexplained injuries.

At that point in time, Whitley had been happily married to the love of his life, Anne for 15 years. Streiber was born in 1945, grew up in San Antonio, Texas, went to a Catholic High School and his views of marriage were traditional. When you made a vow to a woman to love and cherish her forever, that was sacrosanct, you didn’t break it.

But these small town America, conventional ‘50s values also meant the husband had a responsibility to look after, protect, provide for wife and family. What happens then, when you still love and cherish your wife but you also start to feel your grip on consensus reality starting to unravel, you start to think you are going mad? What kind of responsible husband is that?

As Whitley wrestled with his inexplicable inner turmoil, he decided the only moral, decent thing to do was to free Anne from the burden of having to care for a nutcase. He decided he had to push her away, dump her. Although it would completely break his heart.

It was only when in March 1986 he finally made an appointment with Dr Donald Klein, then head of the New York State Department of Psychiatry and an experienced forensic hypnotherapist, that Whitley’s memories of his now famous encounters with otherworldly beings in October and December of the previous year started to surface. He started to come to terms with the fact that something truly weird and unfathomable, had, in fact, actually happened to him, he wasn’t just losing his marbles for no apparent reason.

So where did this leave his relationship with Anne? Whitley, from his revised Introduction to the 2022 edition of Communion, reflects:

“I’d been trying to drive her away because I thought I was going to become psychotic. When I sat down with her to explain what I thought had happened, I was afraid that, instead of me pushing for divorce, it would be her.”

Can you imagine how he felt? We’ve all had that tight, shakey feeling in our bodies when we know it’s time to have ‘the talk’ when a relationship feels like it’s finished.

“But the moment I said “I think I was taken aboard a flying saucer by little men” she burst out with “Oh thank God, I thought you were going crazy!.” She has also remembered herself as saying “Oh thank God, now I don’t have to get a divorce”, but the first sentence is the one I heard – and I was so very, very glad to hear it.”

Whitley and Anne remained a devoted couple until Anne died in 2015. But even then, according to Whitley and their circle of friends, their soul connection continued as movingly documented in his 2017 book The Afterlife Revolution, to which he credits Anne as a co-author.

I love that story. The elevator pitch for a movie version could be: “A romantic bond rescued from a potential dumpster fate by love, trust and willingness to countenance the reality of so-called paranormal experiences.” Of course, Communion did get made into a film starring Christopher Walken in 1989, billed as ‘sci-fi horror’, but that was only after the global reaction to Whitley’s 1987 book was far, far in excess of what he or Anne were expecting. Whitley thought that maybe a 100 people at most might have had a similar experience to his, but a torrent of letters started to come in, describing all kinds of bizarre encounters with ‘the visitors’ (as Whitley calls them), including drawings of faces that looked the same, or very similar, as the one depicted on the now iconic cover of his book. Over the years, the Striebers received over 200,000 letters from close encounter experiencers, keeping in mind this was way before the internet was part of everyday life or ‘alien abductions’ were a cultural meme. Whitley has now donated these letters to Professor Jeffrey Kripal’s newly established Archives of the Impossible at Rice University, so that they can be studied by future generations of scholars and other researchers.

Off to Blighty again

On more terrestrial matters, I’m heading back to the UK next week and will be there until September. I have a lot of adventures and events planned for the Northern summer, including one involving UFOs and another involving physical mediumship, which will be the subject of future posts. On the creative front, there are a couple of exciting vinyl re-releases of some of my back catalogue and a launch party in Berlin (will post about these at the right time too) as well as a London screening of the DIY film myself and Bill Garrett put together for Canary Wharf: the Rock Opera, at Canary Wharf itself on 10 July – tix here.

More soon!

Subscribe now

Nevertheless, it was “mentalist and entertainer” Gerard Senehi’s interactive online session with randomly chosen conference attendees that, I heard from conference organisers later, had the most impact out of all the sessions, including on the conference organisers themselves. And it certainly left me in a state of thrilled wonder, as I was one of the lucky handful who got to participate in one of his ‘experiments’.

To set the scene, no participants in any conference session had their cameras switched on and could only be identified by their little round dots with initials in them, that the conference tech team, handling the live stream feeds, had access to. When Gerard’s session started, and the moderator called out for potential volunteer participants to put up their virtual hands, I clicked on my mouse at a speed worthy of a TV game show contestant, eager to beat the buzzer for the new car or cash prize.

After Gerard’s introduction, the tech team fed my raised virtual hand (amongst presumably many others from the hundreds of attendees) to the moderator who, apparently randomly, selected it.

The tech team then enabled my camera, and there I suddenly was for all to see, looking no doubt somewhat disheveled and in my PJs, after having been up (again) since early hours, following the San Francisco Bay Area conference proceedings.

Gerard then asked me to take a few moments to think hard about something from my childhood, something significant, that he would then attempt to ‘tap into’.

In May last year, I had been developing an idea for a show I wanted to develop and perform called Life Review: An Occult Cabaret. The idea was a sonic autobiography of my life, performed on stage. Not so much along the well worn, conventional story-telling/ rockumentary style of a sequence of linear, physical events in time, but I wanted to trace my life from the much more mysterious influence of heard sounds – both musical (songs I’d heard which seeped into the songs I wrote) and non-musical (the changing technology of everyday life sounds) – starting from the earliest sounds/ music I could remember. I had, a few days before, purchased the sheet music for Bowie’s Life on Mars, and was learning how to play it, as this was definitely one of the songs that I could remember having a huge impact – even a transcendent impact - on me as a child in the ‘70s.

So, Bowie’s Life On Mars came immediately into my mind as a significant childhood memory. I told Gerard that I ‘had the significant childhood event’, and we both started to concentrate. I concentrated on that memory, while he, thousands of miles away, thousands of miles away in the US, sat for a few moments with pen in hand over a paper. Then he started to scribble.

He looked up and asked me.

“Does it have something to do with rock, a rock?”

I hesitated, and looked uncertain. I didn’t know how to respond as it certainly had to do with rock music, but a rock?

He then immediately said “A rock that is red.”

I started to get a few tingles. I nodded a bit. “Kind of…”

He then held up his bit of paper. I didn’t have the presence of mind to do a screenshot, but the image below is a reproduction of what he showed me:

He asked: ‘Mars?’

Goosebumps then in full march across my body, I tried to explain that I had not been thinking about Mars the planet as such, but about the (what I thought was) the globally famous song by Bowie, but neither the song nor even the artist seemed to be familiar to this Parisian/Iranian emigree to the US. Our session quickly ended, and Gerard moved on to other randomly selected participants, and proceeded to amplify the ‘wow’ factor through feats of ‘remote viewing’ and precognition (eg identifying where a pack of cards was kept in a participants home, and then accurately predicting what cards they would then pull).

But is there Life on Mars?

After failed attempts at being a Tommy Steel inspired pop star in the mid-60s, Bowie’s artistic fortunes looked like they were finally rising after he released his homage to the Apollo 11 moon landing, Space Oddity, in 1969, and it was a hit. However, the global ontological shock and amazement that humans had actually landed on the moon apparently wore off very quickly (mind you, given the state of the world, Vietnam War, the depth of American inequality and racism back on planet Earth, even back then, not everyone was thrilled that whitey had landed on the moon). Space Oddity seemed to have been soon forgotten, however, as a ‘one hit wonder’, and his follow up 1971 album, Hunky Dory, on which Life On Mars first appeared, met with only moderate success.

It was only when Bowie went on to identify with ‘the extraterrestrial’ – a platform-booted, glitter-soaked, androgynous gorgeous rock-star alien - Ziggy Stardust - that he truly started to begin his career as a ‘Phenomenon’. From then on, from the lonely, stranded all too human alien on screen in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell To Earth, to the near-death angular/nostalgic musings of his last album, Black Star, Bowie maintained a life-long love affair with the alien.

I think I always took his iconic song’s question “Is there life on Mars?”, delivered in that spine-tingly octave leap, as a metaphor for the unnamable yearnings of the “girl with the mousey hair…hooked to the silver screen”. She was the child me of course, mesmerised by 1970s space-age TV fantasy men like Bowie (I tried to recapture those “cathode tube display” induced quasi-mystical feelings decades later in the song Mr Television Man). But in the last few weeks thanks to (you guessed it) following yet another thread down the UFO research labyrinth, it turns out there may well be (or was) life on Mars, and not of the microscopic kind.

In this 2024 presentation by Peter Robbins, he presents a long list of photos provided by NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory over many decades, including recent ones from the Mars rovers which have been crawling around the planet’s surface now for years collecting samples and taking eerie holiday snaps of their adventures (Robbins is one of the oldest and most respected lay researchers in the UFO field). Robbins makes no attempts to explain the bizarre structures and objects in these photos, but is careful to discuss and give examples of pareidolia – the all too human tendency to perceive a specific often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern. He then show images that he personally finds are very hard to explain away with this term, or as just examples of environmental shapings by natural random forces (or at least not nature as we know it, Jim). Below are two montages I made of my favorite snaps from his presentation.

There are also equally hard to explain structures on the Moon, but one of the consistent features of many Mars and Moon shots over the years provided by the venerable American space agency is that there is evidence that many of the images have been tampered with before they have been released to the public – the blurring/ smudging out of parts of the photos – such as what look like huge pinnacles or towers on the Moon (which must be miles high).

While, like Robbins, I can’t come up with an easy explanation for these anomalous objects and structures (some of which look like ancient settlement ruins) although looking at the Mars photos of what look like statues, crosses, a big tub, top of an old fire hydrant and a Christmas bauble – I am sent into a reverie imagining Mars dwellers hopping down to earth every now and then for a vacation, and bringing back some of their favorite souvenirs. I for one have no problem imagining that the teams of tech drudges NASA must need to employ to trawl over and prepare the droves of images that are to be made public year after year would have in their job descriptions “and just smudge out the weird sh*t we can’t explain”. I wouldn’t call this “a conspiracy theory” as such, so much as, based on my personal work life experience, huge government bureaucracies are by nature massively risk adverse and the top brass never – ever – want to look like they don’t know what’s going on/ are not in control, to avoid the worst imaginable fate of their being publicly embarrassed and/or put on the spot by their political masters.

It could be darker than this, of course, the CIA or one of the other (many!) American defence intelligence agencies could be ultimately be responsible for SmudgeGate – again, not hard to imagine given the Defence Department’s 2020 UAP Security Classification Guide mandated extreme secrecy around the classification of virtually all UAP data, including any visual evidence of UAP. Apparently if you Google, there are now former NASA employees coming forward with their stories about their photo-tampering work.

But I’ve resisted putting that juicy tidbit into the search bar: the UFO is a giddy existential ride, and as Bowie wisely advised, I know I need to hang onto myself. Besides, the Mars anomalies pictures and the Gerard Senehi example of telepathy - have already given me what I needed: a remembrance of magical things past, the re-experiencing of childhood thrill and feelings of enchantment that were so strongly conjured when I first heard/ saw Bowie perform Life on Mars in striping “cathode tube display” all those years ago.

Subscribe now

The UFO phenomenon is currently leading many scientists (across many disciplines) and philosophers forward into the final frontiers of the so called ‘hard problem of consciousness’. The contemporary UFO experience is only the latest of a long history and wide range of ‘impossible’ experiences that have caused intellectuals to “flip” from a rationalist/ reductive materialist view of reality, where mind/consciousness somehow spurts out of the ‘moist robot’ that is the human brain, to a metaphysical view of matter emerging out of consciousness itself, both local (your embodied bit of it) and non local (everything else). A lot of these flippers were and are at the top of their ‘hard’ scientific fields and have Nobel prizes/ nominations to prove it: Jeffrey Kripal’s most recent books The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and The Future of Knowledge and How To Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief and Everything Else) provides a cornucopia of delicious examples.

But as I lay on my pillow, head craned over my laptop following the Houston based AOI proceedings early hours on a Melbourne morning, I found myself actually exclaiming ‘Yes!’ out loud to that “speaking as a woman” audience member’s remark, which turned out to the final remark of the conference. (And yes, sadly, it is generally a non-moist robot, my laptop, next me in bed with whom I share such pillow talk, and not the hunky, faux heterosexual, 1959 Rock Hudson)

.But if it had been hunky, faux heterosexual 1959 Rock Hudson’s head next to mine on the pillow, a Rock who had managed to transcend the apparent typical ‘50s/ ‘60s conventional male lack of curiosity/ incomprehension that women have minds/interiors, then no doubt he would have reached out to hold my hand and asked with tender interest “Why do you say that darling?”

And I would then have ‘felt seen’ (to use the contemporary therapy buzzword), my heart feeling a warm glow, and I would have felt safe to share the following preliminary thoughts (my Rock, of course, has a deeply inquiring mind – which I find even more alluring than his use of Brylcreem).

What if we live in a feeling universe?

For 30 years, cardioneurologists at the Heart Math Institute have been researching the vast reach of the heart’s electromagnetic fields, intersection with and co-influence with earth’s magnetic fields, and implications of the fact that the intrinsic cardiac nervous system sends more information to the brain than the brain sends to the heart. Several months ago, I was lucky enough to watch a preview of their inspiring film The Heart Revolution, which summarises their findings to date and also shows how children can be trained to literally see with their hearts, even when blindfolded. The Institute For Noetic Sciences is also exploring now the more widely known ‘gut brain’ (the subject of neurogastroenterology) could be involved in telepathy. The implications of this kind of research for what we call ‘consciousness’ are vast as they put heart and gut feelings squarely before conventional brain based inquiries into cognition and sensory processing of the world.

When I recently came across the work of the Heart Math Institute, I felt an immediate sense of validation for one of the many epiphanies/ mini-mystical experiences that have sprinkled my life, which was an ‘ah-ha!’ gnostic moment, a strong sense that the universe – the non-local consciousness around us - feels.

I also felt a similar sense of validation when I read this series of conversations between esteemed scientists and UFOlogists J.Allen Hynek and Jaques Valee, published 40 years ago. In it, Hynek, then a bushy-tailed young astrophysics student, suddenly found himself asking one of his Professors ‘But what if humans had evolved emotionally, rather than technologically?’ to which the Professor apparently responded something like ‘You shouldn’t think like that.” Case dismissed.

Occult historian Mitch Horowtiz is one of the new breed of public intellectuals who has embraced the UFO and in this recent YouTube chat discusses how the Phenomenan ties in with latest developments in quantum computing, historical ESP research and his latest book on Practical Magik. I admire Mitch’s writings intensely - not just because of the rigor of his research and determination to shake the wooliness out of a lot of New Age thinking while reclaiming the practical usefulness of some of it’s precepts – I admire him because he loves The Dead Kennedys, never denies the existence of widespread global trauma and the need to be engaged in social justice struggles, and always acknowledges the power of emotions over thought which he compares to “nuclear energy versus the steam engine”.

Nevertheless, when Mitch talks about harnessing and directing ‘the power of sexual energy’ to enact “magic” –affecting events in space and time through sexually charged intention – I recognise he is reflecting an age-old realisation that passion and emotion are critical to inviting the extraordinary in, but I do find myself wondering “Whose sexual urges?”. I think most women have a more complex relationship to their sexuality than men. Female sexuality is experienced as pleasure and excitement, yes, but can also be associated with physical discomfort, violation, unwanted pregnancy and death. And, unlike the UFOs that Jake Barber’s Skywatcher team or Chris Bledsoe manage to summon apparently at will, female horniness can be as elusive as Bigfoot, leading to much faking it (as hilariously lampooned by Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally, my favourite rom com of all time) and missing it (as the reaction of the post-menopausal woman in the famous diner scene suggests).

None of this is to detract from Horowitz (whose books have inspired and helped me a great deal personally, I recommend checking them out) or any of the other truly astonishing minds that are leading the intellectual conversation and research about UFOs and all the other impossible things that come with them (telepathy, interactions with non-human intelligence, out of body experiences, precognition, the list goes on) that are turning out to be, well, possible, and makes you wonder which level of reality we’re all in parked in. (Cartoon below snipped from Jeffrey Kripal’s presentation at the AOI conference):

It’s just that as I watch/listen to the ‘human consciousnesses evolution’ being talked about now – expanded consciousness, consciousness as ground of being, higher consciousness, inter-dimensional consciousness, quantum consciousness, non-local consciousness – I’m not at all sure if any of these ‘consciousnesses’ automatically incorporate feelings or answer Hynek’s wistful question ‘But what if humans had evolved emotionally?”

At this point, I can see my imaginary 1959 Rock Hudson nodding empathetically (he understands me so well!). “I love your mind darling” he whispers “But it’s time to give your body some breakfast!” He glides out of bed, wraps himself in my big fluffy pink satin-trimmed bathrobe (he looks adorable!) and scuffs down into the kitchen to make me some tea and crumpets.

Back to the level of reality I’m currently parked on

And now back to going over the extensive comments my Phd examiners have made on my thesis (a practice-led doctorate in creative arts consisting of my rock opera plus 45,000 words of scribbings about it). While I have passed (yay!), the voluminous critique and amendments suggested by these (Brit, male, widely published popular music theorists) are daunting. No doubt these represent purely objective, analytical, scholarly critiques that have nothing to do with emotional investments in certain theories/ epistemological positions. If I felt initially hurt and unseen by these criticisms (I’ve rallied now thanks to entertaining myself with this blog!), that’s surely because I am a woman, and I shouldn’t be so emotional ;-)

Even if I was the kind of person who actually had a ‘career plan’ (do they really exist, or are they just the anxiety hankies a Linked-In kind of corporate world expects one have pocketed, just in case?), I doubt the overpaid HR consultant engaged to produce such a plan for me would have scrawled “a regular segment on a popular local radio station program where you chat about UFOs” on a post-it note and stuck it on the whiteboard next to ‘Nicole’s Life Goals’.

But it turns out that’s exactly what I’d love to do at this point in my non-career (in order to make God laugh of course) and I’m grateful to have been offered a regular guest spot on the venerable Melbourne 3RRR radio show JVG Radio Method, where I chat about “UFOs and…” in relation to whatever the theme of that particular Sunday afternoon’s show happens to be. Luckily, thanks to the crazy vastness of UFOs as a topic, it is very easy to weave a UFO story around any given theme, no matter how unlikely (eg UFOs and pancakes?! Yes! There are stories about UFO encounters featuring pancakes!)

So I’ll use this forum to post about the UFO topics I discuss when I appear on the show, with links. However, I’ll also continue with the original intention of my Substack which is to document my past, present and future girl’s own adventure stories about experiences with the co-called paranormal past, present and future! So stay tuned!

UFOs and…a recap

But first going back to my first little radio spot a couple of weeks ago, I talked about the three very broad (and overlapping) categories of narrative going on about UFOs right now (in the USA at least) which are: the confused ‘military/ intelligence/ defence ‘there’s nothing to see here or worry about, but just in case they are a potential threat to national security, we’ve classified everything’ narrative, the scientific and academic community who are saying ‘we don’t know what they are, but we want to study them to find out’, and the co-called experiencer community, who have been witnessing UFOs and encountering beings and other weird phenomena associated with them for pretty much forever. I got some queries after the show about some of the books/ organisations/podcasts I mentioned, so here they are:

· The US Military/ potential threat narrative (and evidence) is best described in Pentagon whistleblower Luis Elizondo's book that came out August last year called Imminent

· The scientific perspective and research is best encapsulated in the work of the Sol Foundation established a couple of years ago in San Francisco, they have a YouTube channel with lots of presentations by scientists and other academics which are fascinating.

· The contactee/ experiencer narrative (with the emphasis on metaphysical/ philosophical/ consciousness implications) is well described in this three part series Cosmosis: UFOs and a New Reality which came out at the end of last year, available on most streaming platforms. The main people behind that doco series are Kelly Chase and Jay Christopher King, their podcast Cosmosis (formerly called The UFO Rabbithole) is definitely worth subscribing to.

There is actually a fourth narrative about UFOs, which kind of sits across all of the above, and that is arts/entertainment and pop culture (which is where I fit in!). The UFO and the idea of an alien presence on earth has held a powerful attraction as a subject of contemporary creative story-telling at least since H.G. Wells’ 1897 War Of The Worlds (Jeff Wayne’s 1978 disco infused double concept album of the same name is still an adorable listen).

Generations of kids have grown up on a steady diet of sci-fi comics, TV series, films, games featuring fantastic craft and aliens, and as I mentioned in my first post, reflecting on my own musical output over the years, it wasn’t hard to find the influence of UFO culture hovering over a lot of it! But even here, the narrative about UFOs as imagination goads for artistic creation is updating, and starting to overlap with the experiencer narrative, as more and more creative peeps are coming forward with stories of direct encounters with NHI (Non Human Intelligence) beings, as recounted in this podcast Artists and Aliens.

UFOs and…Power

The theme for this Sunday’s Radio Method was ‘Power’. All UFO narratives involve institutional power struggles and there are countless books and documentaries that rake over this.

There are the internal power struggles within the US military and intelligence services themselves, where defence force personnel who encounter UFOs are silenced by their top brass, starting with the famous redaction of the original RAAF ‘We found a flying saucer!’ press release in Roswell in 1948 (Carey and Schmidt’s Witness To Roswell is a riveting read about the military and intelligence services cack-handling of the incident; Elizondo’s book also goes into contemporary Pentagon and USAF hide and seek shenanigans). There is the Invisible College of international scientists and astrophysicists who for decades were studying UFOs in secret for fear of loss of prestige and jobs in their academic institutions, as told in Jacques Vallee’s book of the same name.

In recent years, numerous former United States government officials and military service members have publicly attested to their observations of unidentifiable craft with beyond next-generation capabilities, now referred to as unidentified arial phenomena (“UAPs”). Former national security officials have also testified to Congress that defence and intelligence authorities have long been aware of advanced non-human entities on the planet and have even retrieved crashed UAPs in operations not previously disclosed to elected officials. These public testimonies sparked renewed governmental interest in addressing UFOs (now officially called UAPs, but I prefer UFOs because its more romantic), leading to the introduction of the UAP Disclosure Act (“UAPDA”) in July 2023, with clauses referring to the “disclosure of recovered technology of unknown origin and biological evidence of non-human intelligence”; a version of the act (with signifiant amendments) was incorporated into the National Defence Authorisation Act passed in December 2024. The act requires public disclosure by all government agencies of all unclassified records relating to UAP and establishes greater congressional oversight over UAP related activities and operations.

But since then all that’s happened is this massive public power struggle between the public rhetoric of military/ intelligence services who continue to insist as they always have done that there “nothing to see here, and anyone who says otherwise is crazy or mistaken”, and the apparently “crazy, mistaken members of the public” which now includes a bi-partisan bunch of reps in the Congressional UAP Taskforce, and this rapidly increasing bunch of whistleblowers- high ranking military “patriots” who are defecting to the ‘crazy’ camp. And these guys are all of a sudden leaning into Congressional hearings insisting UFOs, Non Human Intelligences and recovered alien craft and bodies are real, reflecting on Bronze age civilisations and discussing metaphysical issues about the nature of reality in interviews, and lining up in rows to appear in the forthcoming much-hyped Age of Disclosure documentary film.

But the problem with the Pentagon, the defence department, the CIA, the FBI, USAF, NASA and all the other dizzying array of US intelligence agencies’ positions is that at the same time that they continue to insist, with a straight face, that “there is nothing to see here, a few anomalous things, we can explain ‘em don’t worry about it”, they have also, via the Defence Department’s 2020 UAP Security Classification Guide, mandated extreme secrecy around the classification of virtually all UAP data, including any visual evidence of UAP. So there is both ‘nothing to see here’ AND that “nothing” is top secret and nothing pertaining to it can be declassified and released to Congress or the public. It’s in situations like this that you just wish you had Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam providing a running animation commentary sending up USA ‘defence speak’ as he did so brilliantly about the Cold War narrative back in the day.

But in the last few weeks, this snotty children’s squabble where one kid is screaming: “Show me your UFOs!” and the other kid screams back “I won’t, they’re mine! Besides, I haven’t got any!” has suddenly been disrupted by an adult entering the room. An adult holding their very own UFOs (or rather, the means to get them)!

In January, former Top Gun equivalent airforce guy Jake Barber did a 3 hour interview with Jessie Michels which blew the minds of even the most blown up minds of people (like me) who are trying to follow all the UFO narratives.

Jake explained how he had been a contracted helicopter pilot with top level security clearances whose job it was to retrieve for the military and other unnamed parties ‘sensitive assets’ that had crashed in various locations, usually secured test ranges. A lot of the time, these ‘assets’ were secret experimental military aerospace craft, but over the years he was working for The Program (as this secretive crash retrieval exercise followed by reverse-engineering attempts was/is called in UFO lore and the subject of a recent movie-length documentary) he and his team mates were occassionally called out to retrieve ‘sensitive assets’ that were literally out of this world. The objects had no visible means of propulsion nor any rivets, they were weird shapes like octagons, saucers and even a huge egg, and everyone involved in these operations was acting really strangely and even frightened.

One night on one of these UFO retrieval jobs, Jake had an overwhelming emotional mystical experience of interacting with a “feminine energy, loving and sad”, he was reminded of his mother and of music, and that experience completely transformed him. He decided the presence of these craft and the NHI around some of them had too many profound implications for humanity to be left in the hands of top secret military/ private aerospace interests, so he left the Program. Other operatives who also worked in the Program also left, and he and his buddies have set up their own private company called Skywatcher which is collaborating with civilian scientists to replicate what they used to do back in their ‘black’ jobs but conducted in such a way that the ‘craft’ can be studied scientifically and results made public.

Skywatcher claim they are using technology that was developed in the Program to “summon” craft, technology that is twofold: a device that emits specific electronic frequencies - what they colloquially call a ‘dog whistle’ – that apparently causes UFOs of certain kinds to appear, and the other is ‘neuromeditation’ – or ‘psionics’ (the new UFOlogy buzzword) – where a gifted/ specially trained person following certain mind protocols is apparently able to “call in” a craft. In other words, it’s the connection that can apparently be established between human consciousness/feeling states, properly focussed, and NHI consciousness, that can make certain kinds of UFOs appear.

So what further marks Jake out as the potential squabble-squashing, ‘emotionally intelligent’ new adult in the sweat and tears soaked Disclosure room, is his embracing of ‘soft power’. In this interview with Ross Coulthard a few days ago, he asserts that good intentions and kind feelings for the greater good (not the acquisition of technological power for military or corporate advantage) are the essential preconditions for successfully engaging in this, literally, fantastic endeavour. An update on their latest experiments – including footage, radar and other data captured from objects that have apparently responded to the ‘dog whistle’ – will be on the Skywatcher channel in the next day or so.

Wouldn’t it be fantastic if soft power, good intentions and kind feelings, governed more HI to HI interactions? Guess that’s the kind of crazy, emotional scream from the heart you can’t fit that into an (invoiced) post-it note against ‘Life Goals’. Meanwhile, here’s Jake’s (and Colonel ‘Zero Doubt’ Nell’s) sentiments set to music, the perfect elevator muzak for all HIs and any passing NHIs who happen to be descending into this dimension.

This Sunday 23 March afternoon, I am going onto Melbourne’s most loved local radio station 3RRR for an interview on the much venerated, long running JVG Radio Method show and to talk about all things UFOs and music. I’ve been invited on in response to the latest single my new/old band The Dust Revival Band, has just released called Zero Doubt.

According to our press release (I wrote it, so it must be true): “Zero Doubt is a cinematic, instrumental, EDM influenced track which takes you on a journey into the astonishing but true world of the current UFO disclosure movement in the USA.

Says Skeltys (me) “In the last two years, more and more whistleblowers are stepping out of the shadows of the American military industrial complex and coming forward with increasingly mind bending tales of their experiences with UFOs.”

“The sampled voices in Zero Doubt include that of latest whistleblower, helicopter pilot Jake Barber, who recounts his encounter in terms of a mystical experience of feminine energy “loving and sad” and memories of music. Those sentiments really worked with the track the band had been working on, and it was fun to go back to my old B(if)tek and Artificial ‘90s penchant for sampling real voices talking about the mysteries of human consciousness”.

Despite the fact (or because of the fact) that 3RRR is a community, volunteer run station with no big corporate sponsorship or mandated playlists, it attracts around 400,000 listeners a week and one million website hits a month (please join me as a loyal subscriber). So this has poked me into starting this Substack which I have been meaning to do for a while, which will be a kind of freewheeling romp backwards and forwards in time, documenting my experiences of the uncanny, the mystical, and the Phenomenon, and how those have influenced – and will continue to influence - the toe-tapping High Strangeness that is my music and other creative projects.

A note on my Substack tagline: Psyche – is from ancient Greek, meaning life/soul/breath. In Western usage, it refers to our idea of the mind. Naut is also from ancient Greek, meaning sailor, navigator. So soul-mind journey is what psychonaut means to me.

Wondering how a psychonautical musical journey fits into the current descent into socio-political madness in Western civilisation, I just then picked out my precious vinyl copy of The Psychedelic Sounds of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, released in 1966. This first album by America’s first psychedelic garage band, has wonderful rambling, prophetic liner notes and I find myself agreeing with just about all them, including their assertion that “It is a quest for pure sanity that forms the basis of the songs on this album”.

My love affair with UFOs: looking back

About 18 months, a dear friend shared with me Kelly Chase’s UFO Rabbithole podcast (now rebranded as Cosmosis) and it was through listening to that critical, intelligent, well researched podcast and following various references in it, that I first became aware UFOs were in fact ‘real’ in all senses of the term, further bolstered by the clutches of former military whistleblowers dumping their mind-blowing stories in U.S Congressional hearings and the historic introduction of the UAP Disclosure Act in July 2024.

However, as I reflect on my musical japes going back decades, it is clear that the UFO as a pop cultural signifier of the outer reaches of reality, had been making crash landings into my music right from the start. I present the following testimony in support of my case:

My first band in the early 1990s in Canberra was called an all girl indie-crossover outfit Area 51, named after the highly classified Groom Lake airforce facility in the Nevada desert, long associated with UFOs and allegations of secret underground bunkers hiding God knows what. The first (and only) track Area 51 released on CD, the first Clan Analogue CD compilation in 1995, was called They’re Human. In 2024, I made a pilgrimage to Roswell and picked up some Area 51 bling in the International UFO Museum there. Here’s a pic of the charming DIY cassette Area 51 made all those years ago, surrounded by that high quality bling:

In 1996, B(if)tek (electronic duo featuring myself and Kate Crawford) released our first album Subvocal Theme Park. In Cosmic Love and They Oscillate, I sampled the voice of Uriel (Ruth Norman), an elderly woman who started her own UFO cult in California in the 1970s/ 80s. This is a fascinating film about her and her following.

I carried on the UFO connection with samples in other tracks as Artificial, my then solo retro-hillbilly-house-stoner-disco project (which was described by one music journo at the time as full of '“the most primitive of synth twiddles’, which I think was a dis, but I loved it and quoted it from then on in publicity). I had a ton of fun with B-Grade 50s/ ‘60s UFO films with stilted dialogue musing on strange things on the radar and “thought materialisation”, as in stoner epic Scanning Normal Speed from 2002 album Libraries Are Fun.

From 2004 – 2007, with the first iteration of psych-folk rock outfit Dust and my folktronica duo The Jilted Brides, I started having what many musicians refer to as ‘downloads’, receiving entire lyrics and sometimes whole songs in dreams or just when noodling in studio. Just finished this fascinating book by Grant Cameron, a cracking read, where he does extensive research into UFOs, downloads, the paranormal and pop music. One such ‘lyric download’ for me was The Message from Dust’s 2007 album, which references messages coming through from the sky. In 2008, I had a vivid dream in which I heard all the music and the lyrics to The Jilted Brides’ Feelings Never Felt Before: I got up out of bed in the middle of the night and quickly recorded what I’d ‘received’. The chorus: “Do you know where they come? An invisible sun.”

From 2013-2019 when I was living in London but making the occassional trip back to the USA (where I had lived for a few years prior), I went through my ‘Dylan period’ and released the album Deal With Your Disenchantment in 2017. On one USA visit, I stayed at the Joshua Tree Inn, where Gram Parsons died in 1973, the motel has been perfectly preserved from that time and has a shrine to Parsons in the courtyard. Parsons saw UFOs at Joshua Tree (and was involved in making a never released UFO themed film) one of the reasons he felt it was his spiritual home and wanted to be buried there. Across the road from the Inn, there is some kind of Jesus hall, in the middle of nowhere. I shot a lot of the clip for God Kills Someone Every Day there and also near the rocks where his friends tried to honor his wishes by burning poor Gram’s body there (after they stole the coffin from LA airport!). God Kills mentions UFOs and conspiracy theories.

Well, I’d say that’s enough for a starter post! TDRB will be performing next in Melbourne on Saturday 29^rd March at Coburg RSL if anyone reading this is in town and would like to get down to a bit of psych-folk-rock-saxy-electronic cosmic toe-tapping goodness! More adventures soon as I think of them!

Subscribe now