Bob Pratt, author of UFO Danger Zone, passes away

The details are a little sketchy at this time, but just before posting this last column I got the very sad and tragic news that Bob Pratt, author of UFO Danger Zone, had passed away at his Florida home very suddenly. I understand that it was due to a stroke and that he died on Monday, November 21. We’ll have more details in the next issue on this sad event. Bob’s passing is certainly a great loss to the field of ufology and to his family and many friends.

Don Wright on the Peruvian Whistling Vessels and Other Dimensions

In a recent phone conversation (11-22-05) with Don Wright I asked him about the initial mystical type experience he had with the Peruvian whistling vessels back during his Boston College days, and whether he had any others of note after that, to which he replied, “I’ve had many different experiences with the vessels and others that I’ve been with have had major experiences. Some of them were quite inexplicable. When I first started making them, I was tuning the vessels as a low vessel, and then the next vessel, and the next vessel, as they progressed in frequency. When you’re blowing the vessels in a group you don’t know the order or anything, but I had one guy he said, ‘Wow, you know, these vessels were set up in this configuration,” and he put them up exactly by frequency and he said that they were set up in this triangle. That there is an astral triangle on the other side that matches it, so that there is a power center between this manifested triangle and the astral triangle.”

Trying to grasp what Don was describing I said, “The astral triangle?” Don then replied, “Well, that’s the best..I don’t know if astral is correct, but, you know, when he set them up there is, in a different dimension or parallel universe or whatever we may say, a set of vessels that are their counterpart. Anyway, that’s the way that he described it.” I then added, “And he did correctly identify the different frequencies.” Don replied, “Yeah. That’s what amazed me. He put the highest vessel first, and then he put the vessels behind that, in the triangle, in perfect order.”

I then told Don, “I know that Bonita Luz, who is a transpersonal psychotherapist from over in North Carolina, who has lived in Peru and traveled there quite a bit and led tours...she had told me that she had heard that they were not just for altering your consciousness but also for creating a channel into like another dimension or something.”

“Man, that’s what I felt the first time I experienced them,” Don stated. “In that group back in Boston. It was clear to me that we were opening a doorway and I was frightened by that because it was like the cylinder was infinitely open above and infinitely open below, and I didn’t know what that might be opening to. I remember that night I went back to my apartment, it was about 1 in the morning, and I was so profoundly affected I wrote everything I could remember of the experience. I must have written about 20 pages that took me until the sun was well up.

“Another interesting thing that happened, at that event, that I didn’t write about is that early in that gathering [Don did establish that this was after the whistles had been blown], just kind of like a social gathering, we were sitting around in the front room there, talking about various things, and then everybody got up and went somewhere and I suddenly became aware of a black panther, and this may sound insane, but it did happen. There was a black panther in the room and it frightened me so much that I got up and walked around behind the chairs and the couch and out the door to avoid it.

“I knew nothing about Peru at this time. ...Cusco was in the shape of a panther. ..The jaguar.”

“Then when I was apprenticing with Daniel (Statnekov), we went up into the Puye’ (pronounced Poo Yay) cliff dwellings here in New Mexico and there was no one there, and we went into a kiva, and in this kiva he, I, and his lady friend, who was connected with the Native American shamanic realm, went into the kiva and we sat at equidistances around in the kiva and we starting ‘om’ing. Suddenly I could perceive, very clearly, dark skinned people joining us but in a realm just beyond our realm of existence. I didn’t have a clue about who these people might be until years later when I went to Peru and saw the Peruvian natives. Facial features, haircuts, and dress left no doubt in my mind that the visitors to the kiva were Peruvians. Again I had no knowledge about Peru, but they were Peruvians. It was amazing.

“The kiva was up on this high mountain and there was a sheer cliff there and the people that had lived there before they had built the Pueblo type structures had lived in caves. It was kind of dangerous to walk down the side of this cliff on these little paths, but there were all of these caves scattered about. So from the kiva we went down into one of these caves and sat down and Daniel pulled out some smoking tobacco and rolled a cigarette and he took a puff and passed it to this lady and she took a puff and passed it to me and I took a puff and I gave it back to him and he put it down, and then we closed our eyes to meditate and I suddenly heard the whistling vessels very clearly. I was receiving the message from these guys saying: ‘We are the vessels. It is time for us to return. It is correct for you to be working with this.’ It was not in words but it was like in an awareness, a knowledge that came to me. It was so clear that I opened my eyes and what I saw flying above us and around in a circle was like some bees were flying around and around, or big flies, and then as I looked at them then they flew out a little hole in that cave which was obviously a smoke vent. So that was kind of interesting.”

Jon Thunder wonders: Did a man really walk out on thin air over the Grand Canyon?

On Thanksgiving evening my wife Joan and I were visiting with our good friend Jon Thunder, a professional artist and Apache Indian who currently lives outside of Pulaski, Tennessee. (A couple of years ago, I did a two part interview with Jon for Alternate Perceptions about Native American issues and spirituality) Though we had touched briefly upon Jon’s personal spiritual and UFO experiences in past conversations, he was often busy with his career and one thing and another (he has traveled widely, including Japan and Europe in promotion of his artwork), but recently has been home nursing an injury, and so on this particular evening I asked if he might be ready and interested in going on the record about these matters. He indicated that he was, so I pulled out my miniature tape recorder and a fresh pack of batteries, we laughed some, and then Jon got very serious and I switched on my recorder and listened with great interest.

Jon began by talking about how all people have “superstitions” and beliefs in a “spiritual realm.” “My definition of a superstition is something that is not understood,” he stated. “In the American Indian circles history documents the belief of spirits and if you believe in spirits, there’s good and bad, and some people believe that they can harness this energy and the spirits will do their bidding or whatever. So like every other culture, we have things that are a mystery, and some are good and some are bad. You’ve got to have one to know what the other is.

“And there’s different worship societies. There’s the Sun Dance, the Ghost Dancers, the Pipe Society, and the Peyote Society. These are accepted. These are the ones that mom and dad Indian go, that’s okay, but then you have those circles that dive even deeper. Were they a cult with followers? I don’t know.

“And one happening was around the Grand Canyon, close to a place called The Cut. This happened over twenty years ago. It’s been a long time. It seems like it was yesterday. It’s been a good 22 or 23 years ago.

“I happened to be at a circle, at a gathering of nations, and I met some people there that could show me another side of spiritualism. I was associated with them for about a year and a half and I went out to this place. If you’ve heard of the legends of the shape shifters, people who can separate their physical body from a spiritual body and go to different places, and a person who really explains it well is Carlos Castaneda. He writes about don Juan Matus, a Yaqui Indian. So if you kind of know about that setting then we can jump into the setting that we’re talking about. It’s the same type of persona. The same legends. The same beliefs.

“So roughly in the gathering of about I would say almost maybe a hundred people. It was a good gathering, and I witnessed a man walk a good 30, 40 feet off the lip of the canyon out into the air. It wasn’t levitation because levitation is rising from a platform. He just stepped off and it was like there was an invisible glass bridge. He stood out there and turned around and he spoke to us. I did not understand the words that he was saying because I’m Apache and this man was of Navajo origin. He was speaking old, old Navajo, and I could make out some words, but even if I could understand the words I wouldn’t repeat them anyway. But I did understand what I was seeing.

“There was no type of ingestion of any outside peyote or any type of plant. Was it mass hypnosis? Was it the power of suggestion? I didn’t go there as a believer. I didn’t even go there as a skeptic. I just went there as someone who was interested.”

I then interjected, “And everybody there,”but before I could complete my sentence Jon said, “Everybody saw it. Everybody there saw it.”

“In the circles of old Indians who still speak the languages and still worship the old ways, people like this were talked about. It’s kind of like when you get around the old black people or the old Cajuns, especially the people down around New Orleans. They’ll speak of things that defy what we call reality. We have those stories too.

“But could I document this? No. Would I give the location or the type of group this was? No, because it’s an unaccepted group. I was there as a guest of somebody, very curious about this type of thing, and through my years of living I’ve kind of decided that what I get I’ll get on my own or through prayer or something like that, but not through mysticism or for a lack of a better word magic.

“But I did witness this and it will be something that when I sing my death song and I’m laying on my bed and I know that I’m going to cross to the other side and I’m thinking about my life, the memory of the birth of my kids and everything else that has been of great importance to me, this is an incident that I will definitely think of.”

Editor’s Note: In the next issue, read of Jon Thunder’s UFO close encounter, complete with apparent electromagnetic effects, as well as other intriguing stories.

Home