VISITORS FROM HIDDEN REALMS

Discover the connection between UFO visitors and shamanic lore! Brent Raynes' stunning book—intro. by Brad Steiger.

Bird Shamanism, Bird Whistles, and Cygnus Synchronicities?

As reported by me in this column in the July 2006 issue of this magazine, my wife Joan and I had a most interesting and rewarding day the month before when, on June 10th, myself and others gathered at the home of doctors Greg and Lora Little of Memphis, TN. Their special guests at the time were Andrew and Sue Collins of England. Andrew, the author of numerous books such as Gateway to Atlantis, Alien Energy, From The Ashes of Angels, and now his latest contribution, The Cygnus Mystery, is a virtual walking human encyclopedia regarding ancient civilizations and shamanism. As you can read for yourself in that particular column, we all had quite an eventful day. I had brought along seven functional replicas of the ancient Peruvian whistling vessels (of the Chimu culture) and both Andrew and Sue shared in some interesting experiences with them. Andrew spoke to me about the importance of the star system Cygnus, as it was perceived as a portal to the sky world which, according to shamanic traditions, was often seen as a swan, although to some it was a hawk, a falcon, an eagle, etc. At any rate, they perceived a “Celestial Bird” or a “bird of creation,” that was also associated with a mysterious cosmic or primordial sound. As I pointed out to Andrew, the whistling vessels also seemed to share a bird/sound connection. I later emailed him this quote from Daniel Statnekov’s paper The Hummingbird Clue, in which he described an ancient Chimu statue of a man adorned with a “semi-circular headdress of gold filigree set with turquoise and jade stones.” Then he adds, “From each side of the headdress, next to the statue’s ears, dangle tiny hummingbirds, also made of gold.”

What does it mean? Mr. Statnekov speculated: “Consider the sound of the hummingbird as it flies or hovers overhead: a low pulsating flutter, as if a large night butterfly, drawn to the light, beats its powdered wings against the glass. The hummingbird’s sound is unique in nature, but—interestingly—the Chimu knew how to reproduce it. Following a tradition that had existed for more than a thousand years, Chimu potters fashioned ingenious ceramic bottles that whistle when you blow into them, and when played in concert, create a sound that is most succinctly described as the low fluttering sound of a hummingbird in flight.”

Andrew pointed out to me the potential related significance of the bird bone whistles of the Native Americans. He mentioned California’s Chumash Indian culture, which I began to research on the Internet soon afterwards. Andrew felt that “bird shamanism” was a very important area to explore. In an article entitled People of the Sky: Birds in Chumash Culture, by Jan Timbrook and John R. Johnson, I read the following: “Native dancers throughout California commonly blow bird bone whistles to accompany their movements. …These people have been playing bird bone whistles for 3000 years, up to the present day. Archaeological examples include whistles made from wing or leg bones of Short-tailed Albatross, Snow Goose, Red-tailed Hawk and Cormorant.”

In my book Visitors From Hidden Realms, I described our Indian friend Dove’s presence at a Sun Dance ceremony in South Dakota back in 1986. She said that she had been told that “the Sun Dance and the things that go on there have to do with the connection with the energy that comes from the Pleiades to the earth.” After a recent visit to her Alabama home, she further wrote to me about this ceremony and the use of these bone whistles. She wrote:

“The beam of light that came down to the dance area was there after the blessing of the grounds. There were twelve dancers and each had a whistle on a thong around their neck and kept the whistle in their mouth and blew it as they pulled and lunged with all their weight against the leather thongs with the bone piercing their flesh. There were four men on horse back in the four directions near the White Buffalo Calf Woman’s Pipe Lodge and the light beam could be seen during the day and there were eagles flying over head of each of the men. The children at the dance spoke of the lights, day and night, that danced in the sky and trees. The children would point up to the sky and talk about the lights. Very Holy Place! I miss the people! I miss the Spirit and the Love. Aho!”

I have obtained a functional replica of a eagle bone whistle that when blown in conjunction with one of the Peruvian whistling vessels creates what sounds like another inner ear kind of wind tunnel effect. Thus another area to further explore with others!

At any rate, in recently reading and reviewing Andrew Collins’s scholarly and thought-provoking book, The Cygnus Mystery, I noted some intriguing and synchronistic appearing similarities to certain experiences shared by me and my wife Joan a few years back. I wrote an email in November to both Andrew and my co-editor Dr. Greg Little, describing this matter to them. I was interested in their opinions. Both responded positively to my communication and Greg even encouraged me to go ahead and present this information here in my column, Reality Checking. After thoughtful reflection I’ve decided to do just that. Needless to say, I would be interested in hearing of the opinions and/or relevant experiences of others as well.

I should also mention that Dove, referred to in this email, was our Native American friend Wanda “Dove” Tice (now Reed) described in my book Visitors From Hidden Realms.

Here is what I wrote to Andrew and Greg:

I just wanted to share a few thoughts with the both of you about how certain details in this incredible book, The Cygnus Mystery, have really stood out for me personally, and why. I think that it may be all interrelated, but who knows exactly why or how. I’d be interested in your own thoughts. Andrew, I believe, has certainly connected some significant dots in the matrix of possibilities on a vast historical and global landscape, and maybe on a personal one for me and Joan as well.

My story, more or less, begins with a journal entry on August 29, 1999, when I was describing how I was getting apparent increased psychic impressions since a recent sweat lodge ceremony:

“I have been interested for sometime in visiting Kinlock Shelter at Bankhead Forest in Alabama, and I got the impression that I should go, that there is a petroglyph that I need to pay attention to. I also got that it is an ascension place.”

Nearly a year later, we made the trip. It was July 9, 2000. We actually went to two ancient sites that day. One a couple of miles from Dove’s, near Hamilton, Alabama, an awesome site (called Bi-Lobe, because of a unique rock carving found there) that’s way off the beaten path but well worth the hike there. We went there first and that’s where the story begins. There’s a lot to this whole story, and I’m going to give you the very abbreviated part that fits what I need to tell, although I may end up leaving parts out that may contain importance unrealized. Or not.

The following impressions made no sense to me at the time, as you may gather in reading what I wrote, but when I looked through Andrew’s book, the similarities were interesting. I wrote:

“When at the bi-lobe site yesterday, as we were gathered in a circle, I had an impression of a disk in the sky with huge rings/bubbles (distortions in the fabric of time and space?) around it. In the center of the disk a beam came down to the earth, moving around on the ground, making screeching noise or something…people cowered in fear. I felt that this was just my own unconscious imaginative processes backfiring upon me…”

The drawing I made and included in my journal looks a lot like Plate 29 [from Andrew’s book].

I also wrote: “Also at bi-lobe site, I was off by myself at one point and imagined in my mind’s eye torches burning at night, people crawling underneath the rocks where water runs to have visions…I saw a cross within a circle…words ‘southern cross’ came to me. I figured that this quite possibly came from some previous reading about Southeastern Indians.”

Of course, I was to later discover it wasn’t!

Here is my entry a short time later (07-18): “On Sunday (07-16) during first round of sweat (led by Dove) I was looking (eyes closed) at circular pattern of imagery, in mind’s eye, thinking how this could be caused by internal optical processes and perhaps account, some researchers say, for circular petroglyph patterns, when unexpectedly, in the center, I saw this image of a cactus, and I immediately ‘knew’ this was the ‘bird feet’ symbols at Kinlock. I had read that they could mean ‘trees’ but I had never thought of cactus before this. What does this mean? Had someone been to Arizona, New Mexico, or…?”

So here were three elements from these sites that I see prominently in your book, the circular image projecting the beam, bringing about great change, the bird feet symbol, and the “Southern Cross.”

Plus, while at the Bi-Lobe site, there was an experience Joan had that day that was deeply moving and important for her I feel. For one thing, since that day, she’s been kind of seeing energy/aura type patterns around people and things, from time to time. It comes and goes.

Here’s what I wrote in my journal:

“Dove had told Joan that the spirits of the Grandfathers and Grandmothers were rising up from the mounds and coming in from the south. ‘They are coming here,’ she said. Then she said something like ‘They are here. Their power is strong.’”

“Later, as Joan and Dove were singing, Joan prayed to herself, ‘Grandfathers and Grandmothers, please help me.’ Joan then ‘saw’ in her mind somehow, as though coming in from the direction that Dove had called the south, three dots, coming closer and closer, with something between them flowing back ‘like energy waves.’ Joan, at time, thought that this thing was maybe a cape or mantle, and thought maybe the spirits were bringing it to wrap around her.”

“Joan told Dove about the spirits (three dots) and Dove told her she couldn’t go with them, she had to say and stick with her. Joan felt like she could have gone OOB if Dove hadn’t stopped her.”

“Joan saw a shadow on a wall. She had the mental impression of these words: ‘Like a shadow on a wall, I am with you. Like the wind in the trees, I am with you.’

“When we were meditating in a circle before leaving, Joan felt like someone had put a hand on her left shoulder. Dove was on her left side. She looked, but it wasn’t her. I was on her right. It was not me.”

Those “dots,” by the way, were in a kind of triangular pattern, kind of like the upper part of the Cygnus star system, though that may be connecting too many dots, so to speak.

Since all of this, our Euchee (commonly spelled Yuchi) Indian friend Tom Hendrix shared with us some information on the ancient disk engraving found primarily on shell gorgets and was part of the Southeastern culture here, from the Woodland Period into the Mississipian Period. What caught both my eyes and ears and Joan’s as well was the “three small dots” on this symbol, called the “Symbol of the Crested Woodpecker.” Here’s what the Native American’s apparently have to say about it:

“The outer circle is the father (Universe). The woodpeckers represent four groups of people (possibly Creeks, Chickasaws, Choctaws and Cherokees). Notice they are all connected with a single band, as an umbilical cord, which represents our Mother Earth. Inside the circle there are three small dots—Birth, Life, Death. The eight points that come from the inner circle the old people would not discuss, saying that they were in our father’s home place and we would come to know them in time.”

Well I’ve taken up enough of your time. Hope that you found something in this of some interest perhaps. I like to think that visiting the ancient sites and doing the ceremonies with a proper attitude and mindset can indeed psychically unlock key insights and information for each of us.

I came upon a journal entry on August 13, 2000, where further notes on Joan’s three dots were made, correcting a misunderstanding or two that I had made also. A couple days before, at night, we were driving north on a local highway and Joan noticed three stars of the Big Dipper’s handle that reminded her of the three dots she saw at Bi-Lobe. Upon returning home she drew it out and I noted that it also resembled the upper portion of the Southern Cross, which I pointed out to her from the page of an encyclopedia. However, these “dots” were “dark, not necessarily black, and the background was of blackness.” Not “white” as I had noted once. Also there seemed to be something like a kind of “bluish energy” located “between the dots.”

French Space Agency to Post UFO Data to Internet

We’ve received word that the French space agency, known as the National Space Studies Center, will be archiving on their website approximately 1600 UFO incidents accumulated over nearly a 30 year period, from the public as well as airline professionals. This information should be available about late January or mid-February 2007. The website is: www.cnes.fr.

Though the website is a French one, they do provide a section where information is translated into English.

“The God Experiments”

The popular Discover magazine (December 2006) carried a noteworthy feature entitled The God Experiments: Five researchers take science where it’s never gone before. One of the researchers was Dr. Rick Strassman, author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule, interviewed in the July 2002 (#58) issue of our magazine Alternate Perceptions. The other researcher, Dr. Micheal Persinger, though not interviewed by us, just yet anyway, has been written about quite a bit by us, on account of his intriguing experiments documenting apparent religious type experiences induced in subjects by electromagnetic pulses. And, alas, we did interview Canadian neuroscientist Todd Murphy, mentioned in this article too on account of his marketing of the “Shakti headset,” which duplicates the effects of Persinger’s own laboratory helmet (they have collaborated), whom we did interview in the April 2004 (#78) issue of our magazine! So it’s personally gratifying to see researchers interviewed and described in the pages of Alternate Perceptions appearing also in mainstream science magazines like Discover.

Also, by the way, we’ve written some in our magazine about synesthesia, and this issue of Discover also has an article entitled, “Are We All Synesthetes?” The article points out that while some 4 percent of the population experiences this “tangling of the senses,” like tasting their spoken words or seeing the colors of various words or numbers, we may all (according to British psychologist Jamie Ward) have a bit of synesthesia in us. Dr. Ward stated: “We all, unconsciously, link together music and vision, but only synesthetes are consciously aware of these links.” He did an experiment at the Science Museum in London by asking 200 random visitors to view two different musical animations. One of these was designed by synesthetes to accompany a musical piece, while the other was designed by non-synesthetes. After viewing both of the animations the volunteers were asked which animation better matched the music and the overwhelming majority selected the synesthete-designed animation. One researcher (Richard Cytowic) suspected that “sensory crossover” normally happens in the limbic system of the brain, but that only synesthetes are aware of it, due perhaps to quirks in blood flow or some other factor.

Local Crop Circles

I thought you all might enjoy looking at some crop circles that appeared in a county that borders my own here in Tennessee. A sheriff was called out to investigate and shared these photographs with me. He flew over the site (a corn field) in a helicopter and also took aerial photographs. The largest circle (though not a perfect circle) was apparently about 75 feet across. The corn was laid down in a different direction than the outer circles. The sheriff noted that, though an experienced crime scene investigator, he could only find the farmer’s footprints at the site. He doesn’t suspect the farmer had anything to do with it. In fact, the farmer wanted to keep the matter quiet as he didn’t want locals stomping through his corn field. (The circles could not be seen from the area highway). The sheriff also noted that the corn stalks showed no signs of being scraped by a board, if the circles were made in the manner as those he had read on the Internet about over in England. He also added that whoever made the circles didn’t create them in just a few minutes. It had to involve hours of work.

The sheriff also told me that he’s been looking on the Internet at a lot of these alleged “crop circles,” and hasn’t seen any of the design in this field. If any of our readers have any comments we’d welcome them, and would be glad to pass any theories or useful information on to the sheriff. This case is still open.