nameless
Paranormal Adept
Hello fellow Paracasters, Paracastees,
I thought I would finally get round to writing an introduction for you outlining where I'm at etc.. and by doing so put some future questions I may write into context, help the forum proprieters understand part of their listening demographic and I guess "just be a bit friendly".
I am a young sprightly 37 year old librarian from London who in my spare time messes around with records (big CDs) and illustrates.
You may ask yourself..How did I get here?
Well of course my parents had a lot to do with it! What I mean is my interest in things spooky and esoteric came from when I was a kid and all the weird books, magazines and music lying around the house. Here is an example of what was hanging around to warp my fragile little mind; Mysteries of the Unexplained published by Readers Digest which is a great collection of newspaper articles (the section on exorcism used to scare the beejasus outta me when I read them under the covers with a torch) The Key of Solomon edited by Idries Shah, various Conan books, Asimov and C Clarke fiction, XMEN and The Eagle comics, The Unexplained Magazine( published by Orbis or marshall cavendish?), disney records, that Les Crane record "Desiderata", Sgt. Pepper's, Kick out the Jams. We had great science fiction on TV too such as Doctor WHO, The Invaders, Blake's Seven. Coupled with a jewish grand mother who read tarot and then a catholic upbringing, well you get the picture, oh and a few personal paranormal experiences later.. All of this proved to me the power of the human mind and our imagination and that reality isn't so steadfast and isn't exactly what we are lead to believe.
So all this simmers in the background but I forget this stuff a little. I get older, go to college, get jobs, get girl friends, I don't subscribe to RPG magazines, I don't go to conventions or learn Klingon. I don't turn into the computer programming nerd/geek that possibly the script was meant to read.
I crack on with paying the bills having a good time and I try to keep an open mind about stuff but I realise I still have a puzzle piece that needs finding. LIfe with all its ups and downs, medi(a)ocrities and brutalities, continuing cyclic pettiness, trivialities and materialism stealthily numbs my brain. My imagination was slowly being colonised and privatised by capitalist media entities! Art and culture became entertainment and celebrity. My brain was being starved, it was getting what it wanted but not what it needed. With the advent of "t'interweb" Information was at my finger tips but I didn't feel the need to ask the right questions.
Maybe this has some resonance with others?
Anyhoo by chance, weird stuff happens. Coincidences occur, new paths open up, etc..
Wether it's some inbuilt brain safety net function or weird stuff actually does happen, either way the same result occurs, I get jump started back again into wonder. I start to re-explore past heritages and fascinations. This starts to feel a bit more like living again but i guess I am just re-awakening the past and the things that originally shaped my personality. I start to connect the dots between the writers I like and realise the similar vein they tap and the interests they have. I start to think that rather than reading travel guides and studying maps about places maybe I should start to visit them. On my travels I meet some interesting and respected people who top up my "spirit battery" and keep my faith in humanity alive and more vibrant. I start to re-explore my Fortean interests , now with some added understanding of how it fits into and plays a part in my life. I finally read Robert Anton Wilson who if you haven't read is definitely someone who helps puts things into perspective for you. At the same time I came across RAW and The Excluded Middle, Disinformation put out their seminal books. and their website gets more popular and produces more leads to other sites and people and books. Things are looking up, the evidence was being collated and processed. It seemed for me and others that the nuts and bolts ET hypothesis just didn't fit and as history shows us the technological alien explanations of today were the airships of before or the fairies and angels before that At the same time the Grey marketing meme kicks in big time and not long after I get sucked into it too.
Little hot pellets of excrement start to pelt the electric air cooling device. Let me use an analogy in popular fiction we may be aware off, just like how the X-Files started off great and then went down hill, the factual side of the paranormal equation seemed to be suffering from the same poorly scripted soap opera effect. It seemed to me and many that lIfe was boring but here was a world with aliens and other space crafts, foreign technologies, hidden bases and government secrets, modern midnight ghost stories that were made even more scarier because they could and were reported as being real. The need to want to change the mundane or smash the paradigm was only being replaced by another. I was being entertained again and I didn't like it! I could feel myself sinking into another mundane petty political paradigm , more marketing capitalist colonisation with bedtime storytellers lined up to sell me asleep some new lizard shape shifting Roswell nazi moon base egyptian time travelling facts, told by some incognito secret clearance ULTRA do-gooder who must be telling the truth cos he knows how many times they take out the trash at Wright Patterson and this is confirmed by an unconfirmed military insider.
You know when things go bad when people start calling the things they are into a "scene." It seemed to me that Forteana was being transmuted by the masses into some absence fulfilment device or a new religious paradigm particularly the UFO experience, I guess the need for far out stories became like a drug. Where UFO which once meant Unidentified Flying Objects before now means to many as "alien space ship". Where as for me the interest in the paranormal had lead me to explore or question stuff out of need and plain curiosity, for others it lead them to be entertained or to reaffirm some mistaken or missing belief system. I guess this has always been the case in this field but it seems to be more widespread and apparent now. We all fall prey to it in some ways. Yes, I too once listened to Coast to Coast and went on a whole manner of rabble rousing made up supposedly fair UFO websites that I won't mention (ahem ATS). I feel dirty talking about it.
I've seen and read a lot of journalists and investigators having the credulity questioned and tested much like a disinfo/psy-ops battle ground all because they let their journalistic guard slip and they didn't check their facts or do their home work, and unfortunately this taints the good stuff that went before. Which leads me to the Paracast.
I got turned onto you guys via Dark Matters radio. I listened to all the archived shows when I stumbled across Don Ecker's reportage. I soon found that the show seemed to mirror my own disenfranchisement with/from the whole unexplained media and research realm. It seemed the more Don got pissed off so did I! It then got to the stage where I realised how bad things are with the so called UFO/Paranormal community with a seemingly lack of professional ethics and basic omnilogical empiricism. But then I found the Paracast. I was really happy to have found it and listening has been part of my weekly routine now.
I feel their is a real need to clue people in on all of the stuff around the actual reportage and investigatory work into the paranormal, just to stop people from getting the wrong end of the stick or coming to this with pre conceptions and prejudices. Some kind of time line history would be great, recommended reading lists too and recommended websites and organisations.
I wish there was some real accredited peer review publications and or organisations too and some academic qualification.
Please keep up the good work and I implore all people who feel the same to support Gene, Chris and friends.
peayyycce
I thought I would finally get round to writing an introduction for you outlining where I'm at etc.. and by doing so put some future questions I may write into context, help the forum proprieters understand part of their listening demographic and I guess "just be a bit friendly".
I am a young sprightly 37 year old librarian from London who in my spare time messes around with records (big CDs) and illustrates.
You may ask yourself..How did I get here?
Well of course my parents had a lot to do with it! What I mean is my interest in things spooky and esoteric came from when I was a kid and all the weird books, magazines and music lying around the house. Here is an example of what was hanging around to warp my fragile little mind; Mysteries of the Unexplained published by Readers Digest which is a great collection of newspaper articles (the section on exorcism used to scare the beejasus outta me when I read them under the covers with a torch) The Key of Solomon edited by Idries Shah, various Conan books, Asimov and C Clarke fiction, XMEN and The Eagle comics, The Unexplained Magazine( published by Orbis or marshall cavendish?), disney records, that Les Crane record "Desiderata", Sgt. Pepper's, Kick out the Jams. We had great science fiction on TV too such as Doctor WHO, The Invaders, Blake's Seven. Coupled with a jewish grand mother who read tarot and then a catholic upbringing, well you get the picture, oh and a few personal paranormal experiences later.. All of this proved to me the power of the human mind and our imagination and that reality isn't so steadfast and isn't exactly what we are lead to believe.
So all this simmers in the background but I forget this stuff a little. I get older, go to college, get jobs, get girl friends, I don't subscribe to RPG magazines, I don't go to conventions or learn Klingon. I don't turn into the computer programming nerd/geek that possibly the script was meant to read.
I crack on with paying the bills having a good time and I try to keep an open mind about stuff but I realise I still have a puzzle piece that needs finding. LIfe with all its ups and downs, medi(a)ocrities and brutalities, continuing cyclic pettiness, trivialities and materialism stealthily numbs my brain. My imagination was slowly being colonised and privatised by capitalist media entities! Art and culture became entertainment and celebrity. My brain was being starved, it was getting what it wanted but not what it needed. With the advent of "t'interweb" Information was at my finger tips but I didn't feel the need to ask the right questions.
Maybe this has some resonance with others?
Anyhoo by chance, weird stuff happens. Coincidences occur, new paths open up, etc..
Wether it's some inbuilt brain safety net function or weird stuff actually does happen, either way the same result occurs, I get jump started back again into wonder. I start to re-explore past heritages and fascinations. This starts to feel a bit more like living again but i guess I am just re-awakening the past and the things that originally shaped my personality. I start to connect the dots between the writers I like and realise the similar vein they tap and the interests they have. I start to think that rather than reading travel guides and studying maps about places maybe I should start to visit them. On my travels I meet some interesting and respected people who top up my "spirit battery" and keep my faith in humanity alive and more vibrant. I start to re-explore my Fortean interests , now with some added understanding of how it fits into and plays a part in my life. I finally read Robert Anton Wilson who if you haven't read is definitely someone who helps puts things into perspective for you. At the same time I came across RAW and The Excluded Middle, Disinformation put out their seminal books. and their website gets more popular and produces more leads to other sites and people and books. Things are looking up, the evidence was being collated and processed. It seemed for me and others that the nuts and bolts ET hypothesis just didn't fit and as history shows us the technological alien explanations of today were the airships of before or the fairies and angels before that At the same time the Grey marketing meme kicks in big time and not long after I get sucked into it too.
Little hot pellets of excrement start to pelt the electric air cooling device. Let me use an analogy in popular fiction we may be aware off, just like how the X-Files started off great and then went down hill, the factual side of the paranormal equation seemed to be suffering from the same poorly scripted soap opera effect. It seemed to me and many that lIfe was boring but here was a world with aliens and other space crafts, foreign technologies, hidden bases and government secrets, modern midnight ghost stories that were made even more scarier because they could and were reported as being real. The need to want to change the mundane or smash the paradigm was only being replaced by another. I was being entertained again and I didn't like it! I could feel myself sinking into another mundane petty political paradigm , more marketing capitalist colonisation with bedtime storytellers lined up to sell me asleep some new lizard shape shifting Roswell nazi moon base egyptian time travelling facts, told by some incognito secret clearance ULTRA do-gooder who must be telling the truth cos he knows how many times they take out the trash at Wright Patterson and this is confirmed by an unconfirmed military insider.
You know when things go bad when people start calling the things they are into a "scene." It seemed to me that Forteana was being transmuted by the masses into some absence fulfilment device or a new religious paradigm particularly the UFO experience, I guess the need for far out stories became like a drug. Where UFO which once meant Unidentified Flying Objects before now means to many as "alien space ship". Where as for me the interest in the paranormal had lead me to explore or question stuff out of need and plain curiosity, for others it lead them to be entertained or to reaffirm some mistaken or missing belief system. I guess this has always been the case in this field but it seems to be more widespread and apparent now. We all fall prey to it in some ways. Yes, I too once listened to Coast to Coast and went on a whole manner of rabble rousing made up supposedly fair UFO websites that I won't mention (ahem ATS). I feel dirty talking about it.
I've seen and read a lot of journalists and investigators having the credulity questioned and tested much like a disinfo/psy-ops battle ground all because they let their journalistic guard slip and they didn't check their facts or do their home work, and unfortunately this taints the good stuff that went before. Which leads me to the Paracast.
I got turned onto you guys via Dark Matters radio. I listened to all the archived shows when I stumbled across Don Ecker's reportage. I soon found that the show seemed to mirror my own disenfranchisement with/from the whole unexplained media and research realm. It seemed the more Don got pissed off so did I! It then got to the stage where I realised how bad things are with the so called UFO/Paranormal community with a seemingly lack of professional ethics and basic omnilogical empiricism. But then I found the Paracast. I was really happy to have found it and listening has been part of my weekly routine now.
I feel their is a real need to clue people in on all of the stuff around the actual reportage and investigatory work into the paranormal, just to stop people from getting the wrong end of the stick or coming to this with pre conceptions and prejudices. Some kind of time line history would be great, recommended reading lists too and recommended websites and organisations.
I wish there was some real accredited peer review publications and or organisations too and some academic qualification.
Please keep up the good work and I implore all people who feel the same to support Gene, Chris and friends.
peayyycce