Beyond belief: did this 1958 TV show predict Donald Trump?

I posted an excerpt from this the other day. It is just too weird! I wondered if the entire episode might be on YouTube, and here it is. I initially thought: it's a hoax, it's redubbed. Or maybe it's just edited to look coincidental. But in watching the whole thing, the coincidences are downright weird.

It's about a man called Trump who comes to town predicting an attack on the townsfolk by a terrifying outside force. Only HE has the answer to protect them from this deadly threat: build a wall! The wall, quite predictably, comes at a price.

It all falls apart in the end, of course, but not before 99% of the townsfolk fall into line with his scheme. He is so convincing that normally law-abiding citizens are driven to break into the bank to finance his "wall".

What scared me most about this isn't the Trump character and his eerie similarity to you-know-who. It's the automatic knee-jerk reaction in the town, the rapid contagion of this stupid, senseless belief, and people's willingness and even need to unquestioningly fall into line and "obey".

They're sheep, as are most people. We're herd animals, or perhaps even flock animals, bird-brained. The con man's "wall", by the way, is so ridiculous that it's literally paper-thin. But until that moment of inevitable disillusionment, almost nobody doubts its power to save their world.

There's something happening here

This is my attempt to record that deathly sound I was writing about, you know, that doomy night noise that no one believes. It's there, but did not record very well, and I talked too much, perhaps out of nervousness. Bentley appears in this one, as he does in so many of my videos. He is my guide and my familiar.

More and more I notice another kind of sound during the day, whatever the hell it is. Am I imagining this? At first I fervently hoped it was the refrigerator going on and off, since it did seem to stop once in a while. But I checked when it was loudest, and the fridge was off.

It's always on one pitch, very low, very doomy. I hate it. I can't wear a headset or earplugs because they seem to concentrate it. I can't have music on all the time. If I'm totally absorbed in something else, it seems to go away, but it doesn't. If I focus on it, it becomes almost unbelievably loud.

The noise on the video, however, is definitely an aircraft. We've had some weird violence in our neighborhood lately, the kind of things we never used to hear of when we moved here. Recently there was a murder behind the recreation centre. Maybe the cops DO fly over, or the military, or someone else. Bill said he saw a police helicopter circling in the air above our local Walmart, where someone had threatened a clerk in the Customer Service department. For God's sake, people! If you have an item to return, bring your receipt. Don't wear the socks before you bring them back.

That sound MUST be coming from somewhere. It doesn't even seem to be outside. When I'm outside, there's too much ambient noise to pick this up. I swear, every so often it completely stops.

A noise machine?

I just had this weird memory. In Chatham, when I was growing up, the environment was very strange. I see now that we weren't a normal family. We used to get static on the TV all the time, for no reason that was apparent. There was an old lady named Mrs. Clackett, and for some reason my mother used to say, "Mrs. Clackett is running the static machine again."

Does someone around here have a static machine? A doom machine? A what?

Now I remember something else. In Chatham, there was a local whore. She had a lot of children, rumored to be by different men. One of her children was red-haired. A nice lady asked her, "Does his father have red hair?"

"I don't know. He didn't take his hat off."

I don't know what's wrong with me.

How Scientology ruined my life

It happened again this morning.

I say "again" because it was "again", the second time I've run into this problem - a problem so bizarre that no one I've asked seems to know anything about it.

I was tooling through Facebook as usual, trying in vain to skip the ubiquitous Donald Trump articles, when bung. The thing froze, I mean Facebook. I thought: fine, it happens, I'll just wait it out, it'll unfreeze in a second.

Then.

It came up again, a warning so ominous it hit me in the pit of the stomach.

It was a little box at the top of the page, and it went something like:

WARNING. Your files are unresponsive. If you wish to wait until they are responsive again, click WAIT. If not, click KILL and the files will be KILLED.

They listed the three most recent files I had opened. At the top was my Facebook page.

There were two rather large, strange-looking buttons: on the right, a WAIT; on the left, a KILL. Beside the KILL was the most bizarre graphic ever seen: it looked like a cartoon "file" (a paper file, literally) that had been nuked and was now dead. It was lying in a heap, and its eyes were two black x's. Smoke, or something, was coming out of it.

I cannot tell you how ominous and horrible it looked.

What do you do when you see a thing like that? Everything was frozen, I couldn't get out of there. I had no idea if the "kill button" would really work if I clicked on it. I was even tempted to click on it, to find out. But I knew that it could be catastrophic.

So I clicked WAIT, and eventually the box went away and things went back to "normal", or as normal as they could be after a Facebook hijacking.

What gives me the queasies is that nobody, but nobody knows what this is. I couldn't find anything close to the nasty little "killed file" graphic. I did find some information, after some digging, about what it means to "kill" on the internet. It's not quite what I thought, fortunately. To fix it, there's some sort of program you can buy online:

A simple-to-use program that offers support for context menu integration for helping you removes files securely from the computer

File Kill is a lightweight software application that helps you delete data permanently from your computer.

If you opt for a normal deletion process, you should take into account that your sensitive data may be retrieved using recovery tools, so you are still exposed to data leakage issues.

This is why you need dedicated utilities, like File Kill, for making sure the information is wiped out securely from your system.

File Kill offers support for context menu integration, so you can easily select the files to be processed.

The file deletion process can be carried out using of the multiple pass methods (e.g. one, three, thirty-five). What’s more, you are allowed to stop, pause, or resume the wiping task.

File Kill needs up to several minutes to complete a deletion operation with a high number of passes, and it stresses up the CPU and memory, so the overall performance of the computer may be burned.

Since it doesn’t require much computer knowledge to work with this tool, even rookies can set up the dedicated parameters with minimum effort.

However, more experienced users may find it pretty inconvenient to work with a tool that doesn’t offer support for powerful deletion algorithms, such as Gutmann, which is able to securely overwrite the contents of files, and the well-known sanitization algorithm, DoD 5220.22-M, just to name a few suggestions.

To sum things up, File Kill seems to be the right choice in case you are looking for an easy-to-use program that helps you delete data securely in just a few steps. Thanks to its straightforward approach, it can be mastered by beginners and professionals alike.

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And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. 

And oh, yes. Give me File Kill any day. It just sounds so friendly! My ass. It's about as friendly as an organized Scientology harassment campaign. The kind where they never let you see your mother again. Such terms: Autorun Eater, Direct X Eradicator! Not to mention the Pocket Killbox (nice and portable, they should do an infomercial on it for KVOS), Direct X Happy Uninstall, and Powerful Cookies. What do they put in those cookies, do you think?

I thought it was called "delete". I really did. If you wanted to get rid of something, you deleted it! Oh, the police could retrieve it if they needed to, but I didn't need to worry about that. I assumed that if it was still around, it was up in the "cloud" somewhere, wherever that is, but it didn't bother me because I had no criminal record. I'm too boring to bother with.

Now this. For the second time. And I did nothing to bring it on.

Or. . . 

I said some bad things about David Miscavige, I admit. I said he was short. REALLY short, which he is. Short as shit. Which he is! Tom Cruise is five-foot-six, and look at how he TOWERS over that little dickweed. 

He's a prick, but everybody says so. They wouldn't come after me. Would they? Would they really kill my Facebook page?

But this cannot be from Facebook. The warning even looked weird. Not Facebookian at all. And that cartoon! What a piece of shit THAT was. Is it a prank? A virus? A particularly nasty form of clickbait? Just a way to scare the jeezus out of me on a Monday morning?

I wish I had a screenshot of this thing, it was so evil you wouldn't believe it. Why would this even come up? Why would I want to kill ANYTHING, let alone my (I assume) entire Facebook page? All it did was freeze for half a minute or so. 

Stuff freezes. It doesn't mean you DID anything. 

I rebooted, but felt nervous that this could come up again. It had kept some kind of record of the other two pages I had recently gone on. But so fucking what, Google keeps records on ALL that shit! Come to that, how could you "kill" a webpage that exists, that is still there? It's not possible. 

Sounds like something the CIA might do, or Kirstie Alley or John Travolta, or someone worse. If there is anybody worse. 

ANTICLIMACTIC UPDATE. After working on it literally all day, I did finally find out what the hell this is. It's something to do with Google Chrome, not Facebook, but it's too technical for me to begin to describe.

These things are called Kill Pages, which sounds like Mafia rather than Scientology.  The thing that came up looked something like this:

That's pretty much what I remembered. I don't know why I wasn't able to find this up to now, but I may have used the wrong search terms. "Unresponsive" seemed to be the key word.

Nothing to do with Scientology. Damn! It's Google Chrome. What an anticlimax. I was pretty much right about that poor nuked file, however, the asterisk-like eyes and smoke or steam floating in the air. It's toast.

I found all sorts of instructions as to how to fix this. I'm going to ask my son. I never again want to read the instructions "KILL THEM" while I'm trying to enjoy my morning coffee and a bit of Facebook.

National Anthem subliminal messages: I can't even SEE these fucking things!

In the past few years, the internet has gone from "the gift that keeps on giving" to a cacaphonous bedlam of screaming-each-other-down-so-we-can-go-viral, wildly competing voices. The worst aspect of this is the mad competition to post a video of your kid having a meltdown and screaming in terror and grief, so that it can appear on the TV news and make the kid's parents vaguely famous for a day (until someone else comes along with a cuter, more traumatized kid). Never mind the one-year-old strapped to water skis that I recently saw: it was "his idea", of course, just like Jon-Benet begging and begging her mother to put her in beauty pageants when she was two. And just as safe .

And never mind what the KID thinks when he/she is a little bit older, and the humiliating, shitty-pants, howling video shows up on her Instagram page, mocked and jeered at by her "friends". It's quite ironic that while internet fame is ridiculously fleeting, these videos are forever. There is really no such thing as "delete". (And with kids, there is no such thing as "choice").

The aptly-named viral video is truly a sick phenomenon, but who notices it? Who even says anything any more? Once more, we're frogs in hot water, chuckling away at the casual violation of a child's emotional wholeness for the sake of popularity and "fame".

Which leads me to something KIND OF related to this.

Every time I look on  YouTube, there are approximately one billion more videos on the subjects I am interested in: meaning that it is much HARDER for me to find anything I want. With no sort of filter on the quality/quantity of content, YouTube is simply drowning in its own material. I found a playlist with 1,697 videos in it just of old TV signoffs. You know: those things they used to have at the end of the broadcasting day before everyone went to 24 hours.  (Too long ago for YOU to remember, of course.) I seldom saw them as a kid because I just wasn't up that late, except for the few times I was allowed (as a rare treat) to sleep on the pullout sofa in the den and watch Hoolihan and Big Chuck.

But since they continued well into the '80s, I do remember signoffs and the strange things that happened in them, especially the religious messages - why on earth do we need a religious message before we turn off the TV? Is it like that awful prayer, "If I should die before I wake" - ? But even in the '80s, there were sermonettes and reflections and Thoughts for the Day, generally sappy and pretty excruciating. They usually rotated Christian and Jewish (but likely not Muslim) clergy for these, just to show they were Not Prejudiced and Jewish people maybe had something to say too, before the test pattern and the "booooooooooooooop" came on for the next six hours.

Sleeping in the den, if I was watching Canadian TV, which was not too bloody likely, there would be a nice version of O Canada with pictures of moose and squirrels and stuff, and Mounties doing the Musical Ride. But usually I'd have U. S. channels on.  So I'd have to sit through the plodding, martial, heavy-handed American national anthem (which I now see has so many question marks in it that it should be called The Star-Spangled Banner?), in which the tune is almost as bad as the militaristic, violent, battle-inspired words. Sorry, American friends (especially YOU, and you know who you are), it's the anthem I hate and not you. In my present frame of mind, I despise ALL anthems, in fact. The very idea of one makes me squeeee-yuke.

So in clicking around amongst all these hundreds and hundreds of signoffs - most of them too recent to really please me very much - I once again ran into the above National Anthem Conspiracy Theory video. There are tons of them on YouTube.  Like most conspiracy theories, it's stupid: people rabidly WANT to believe them because their lives are dismal and they feel like flops and failures as human beings. Or else they're just bored. Real life isn't spicy enough, they don't yet realize they're going to die, perhaps horribly - so they have to jack up their adrenaline by climbing the sides of buildings and stuff, and believing this shit.

Supposedly, way back in 1966 or whenever, The Government had someone doctor up the words on the screen to say all kinds of subliminal, authoritarian things (but only if you looked real fast). It's hard for me to wrap my head around the concept of displaying the lyrics of your own national anthem, to begin with. Unless English is your second or third language, you're going to know them already. You sing them at every sporting event, You would know them from childhood, along with putting your hand on your heart and reciting, "I pledge allegiance to Big Brother" (etc. etc.)  I think you HAVE to know them to become an American citizen, don't you? So the whole idea of flashing the words across the screen, especially in such an ugly font, is pretty ludicrous, and may well be a hoax in itself.

Maybe if your brain works either really quickly or really slowly, you'd be able to somehow perceive all those Orwellian messages about God and the government and obedience and, most menacing of all,  Naomi. (I am reminded of - oh, I've GOT to do a palindrome post soon, they'll get me out of this vile mood! - "I moan, Naomi", or even "'Naomi, sex at noon taxes',  I moan".)

But this probably isn't THAT Naomi. This is a Naomi meant to read backwards only.

If all this had worked, how do you account for the unprecedented upheaval in the social order in the late 1960s? Couldn't people read? Weren't they paying any attention to the subliminal messages? Reading them - actually reading words they had been singing since they were two? Several videos have debunked the subliminal messages as mere video doctoring, which of course never happens! How can you change a film? A film!

Think of the Hanging Munchkin in The Wizard of Oz. There are STILL people who believe that sucker was there in the original film, and that the studio somehow blotted it out by superimposing a bird. Thus Judy Garland and her merry companions danced down the Yellow Brick Road with a dead human body just hanging there in the woods, in full view of the camera, the cast, the director and the technicians.

Though it could very well be that the munchkin blotted out the bird. These things happen in the merry old land of paranoid mistrust.

The Star Spangled Banner Lyrics

By Francis Scott Key 1814

Oh, say can you see by the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars thru the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream:
‘Tis the star-spangled banner! Oh long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more!
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved home and the war’s desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav’n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust.”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Now, there are aspects of this that I find strange. Of course Americans don't go on and on singing EVERY verse of their national anthem. They make the first verse look like a walk in the park, and even speak of slavery in an ambiguous way (not to mention justifying conquest "when our cause is just").. But putting that aside, I find it strange that there are three question marks in the first verse, the one they DO sing at sporting events. I noticed this in the subliminal messages video, and thought it couldn't be right. I don't expect Americans to question things like this - oh, maybe they do, I'm just in a bad mood about Trump, and no doubt you are, too. HIM I question, and how he ever got so far.

Just for the sake of fairness, and because I don't really know the other verses, here's the Canadian one. We've been squabbling over the sexism of  "in all thy sons command" for years now, wanting to substitute "in all of us" - which I wouldn't mind so much, if it didn't clang so badly in a lyrical sense. But it will probably happen anyway. At least it's better than the original suggestion: "in all of thy command", which demonstrates a jaw-dropping ignorance of the grammar of that line. In that version, Canada is somehow the one with (noun) "command". The actual meaning is in the imperative: "please, please, wonderful Canada, command true patriot love in all your sons (which includes sons with no wee-wee)!" It's the upside-down sentence structure that has people confused. But there are still people who argue bitterly with me about this. "All of thy command", indeed.

When I decided to dig this up, I was astonished to find all these different versions. The thing evolved. I am not going to bore you with an endless history of all the different permutations, except to say that it evolved from a quite majestic French lyric that nobody understands, into the middle-of-the-road English one we sing today (at sporting events). Incredibly, in the current official version there is still a mention of God, which for some reason no one objects to - yet. Who knows what the substitute for the lines "God keep our land/Glorious and free" will be? "Justin Trudeau" might work for the first one.

O Canada! Terre de nos aïeux,
Ton front est ceint de fleurons glorieux!
Car ton bras sait porter l'épée,
Il sait porter la croix!
Ton histoire est une épopée
Des plus brillants exploits.
Et ta valeur, de foi trempe,
Protègera nos foyers et nos droits.
Protègera nos foyers et nos droits.

Verses additionnel:

Sous l'oeil de Dieu, près du fleuve géant,
Le Canadien grandit en espérant.
Il est d'une race fière,
Béni fut son berceau.
Le ciel a marqué sa carrure
Dans ce monde nouveau.
Toujours guidé par sa lumière,
Il gardera l'honneur de son drapeau,
Il gardera l'honneur de son drapeau.

De son patron, précurseur du vrai Dieu,
Il porte au front l'auréole de feu.
Ennemi de la tyrannie Mais plein de loyauté.
Il veut garder dans l'harmonie,
Sa fière liberté;
Et par l'effort de son génie,
Sur notre sol asseoir la vérité.
Sur notre sol asseoir la vérité.

Amour sacré du trône et de l'autel,
Remplis nos cœurs de ton souffle immortel!
Parmi les races étrangères,
Notre guide est la loi;
Sachons être un peuple de frères,
Sous le joug de la foi.
Et répétons, comme nos pères
Le cri vainqueur: Pour le Christ et le roi,
Le cri vainqueur: Pour le Christ et le roi.

In the following version, there was an attempt at a literal/word-for-word translation of the French original, which came out about as well as these things usually do:

O Canada! Our fathers' land of old
Thy brow is crown'd with leaves of red and gold.
Beneath the shade of the Holy Cross
Thy children own their birth
No stains thy glorious annals gloss
Since valour shield thy hearth.
Almighty God! On thee we call
Defend our rights, forfend this nation's thrall,
Defend our rights, forfend this nation's thrall.

Now, HEY, this one reminds me so much of America the Beautiful that it just isn't funny. Amber waves of grain, and stuff. (I still haven't figured out what a "fruited plain" is.)

O Canada! In praise of thee we sing;
From echoing hills our anthems proudly ring.
With fertile plains and mountains grand
With lakes and rivers clear,
Eternal beauty, thos dost stand
Throughout the changing year.
Lord God of Hosts! We now implore
Bless our dear land this day and evermore,
Bless our dear land this day and evermore.

And here you see our staunch ties with Britain, which existed until they weren't there any more. Which they aren't. But I do remember having to draw a Union Jack in school, and singing God Save the Queen.

O Canada, our heritage, our love
Thy worth we praise all other lands above.
From sea to see throughout their length
From Pole to borderland,
At Britain's side, whate'er betide
Unflinchingly we'll stand
With hearts we sing, ‘God save the King.’
Guide then one Empire wide, do we implore,
And prosper Canada from shore to shore.

THIS one is getting closer to the final version, but it just goes on too long.

O Canada! Our home and native land!
True patriot love thou dost in us command.
We see thee rising fair, dear land,
The True North, strong and free;
And stand on guard, O Canada,
We stand on guard for thee.

(Refrain)

O Canada! O Canada!
O Canada! We stand on guard for thee.
O Canada! We stand on guard for thee.

O Canada! Where pines and maples grow,
Great prairies spread and lordly rivers flow,
How dear to us thy broad domain,
From East to Western Sea;
Thou land of hope for all who toil!
Thou True North, strong and free!

(Refrain)

O Canada! Beneath thy shining skies
May stalwart sons and gentle maidens rise,
To keep thee steadfast through the years,
From East to Western Sea.
Our own beloved native land,
Our True North, strong and free!

(Refrain)

Ruler Supreme, Who hearest humble prayer,
Hold our dominion within Thy loving care.
Help us to find, O God, in Thee,
A lasting, rich reward,
As waiting for the Better Day
We ever stand on guard.
(Refrain)

And now, pant-pant-pant, here we are at the one we actually sing. Pared down immensely. It has been subtly changed through the years, particularly removing three or four "stand on guards" that really didn't need to be there. But I like it. I don't sing it very often because I don't go to sporting events.

O Canada! Our home and native land!
True patriot love in all thy sons command.
With glowing hearts we see thee rise,
The True North strong and free!
From far and wide, O Canada,
We stand on guard for thee.
God keep our land glorious and free!
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

TOP-UP. I usually top these things up because I forget something, or else think of something else I want to tack on. 

My Dad, bless his sometimes-belligerent soul, was born in England and had not much patience with what he called The Americans. He especially did not like their anthem. How often I remember (over and over again, because he didn't seem to remember doing things) he would bellow his own version of the first couple of lines:
O say can you see
Any bedbugs on me?

He generally ended his satirical version with "the land of the free, and the home of the slave." He had something there. I grew up in Chatham, which is in the Windsor-Detroit area and a settlement point for the Underground Railroad, a historic route of refuge for slave families. I didn't even know what it WAS until much later, as it was never once mentioned in school, though we had a high black population in Chatham. Each of my classes had at least 3 or 4 black kids out of 30, and sometimes more like 5 or 6. But nobody stopped to ask how that happened. 

As with the Royal York Hotel turning away George Gershwin because he was a Jew, Chatham turned away black history and virtually annihilated it - when it should have been a point of pride. So everybody got cheated. One wonders why humanity has such a tight grip on mean-spirited bigotry. It will be the death of us, I am afraid - and sooner than we think.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

This is not a hoax: the Area 51 phone call

This is filed under the category of found, lost and found. I listened to it years ago, back when I was first beginning to take YouTube seriously and use it as a source of information rather than just stupid cartoons and 1950s soup commercials. 

And yes, I DO look at alien footage sometimes late at night when I need a thrill before going to bed. Most of it is so ridiculous that I can't even laugh at it. And I know a lot of it is deliberate prank stuff, but there's something about this particular call that doesn't sound prankish to me at all.

This is an archival recording much cherished by the conspiracy theory community. In 1997, someone phoned Art Bell's Dark Matter radio program, sounding as if he was facing the apocalypse single-handedly. Either this guy is the best actor in the world, or something horrific has just happened to him. Or he has experienced a psychotic break and is spinning into an abyss of paranoia (all that illuminati/survivalist/freezedried/freemason/jesus-in-the-cheese-sandwich stuff). 

What he seems to be saying is that he worked in the mysterious Area 51, the ideal picnic spot for extraterrestrials around the galaxy, before being forced to take a medical leave. According to the distraught caller, what we call "aliens" aren't just little grey men running around in parking lots, as they so often appear in these YouTube videos, or laid out on slabs being autopsied. They're some sort of evil mind-controlling entity that transcends the physical. The buggers must be beyond evil, or they wouldn't be preparing for some sort of mass destruction of earth's major population centres (why?). I suppose one could conjecture that these entities took over the minds of the pilots of those doomed planes on 9-11, but I'm afraid that lets us off the hook too easily. 

When somebody really doesn't want to own something, some evil deed or some horrendous trait they harbour, they can in some cases split it off, shove it away in a dark closet, where it doesn't die but takes on a murky life of its own. Suddenly it's not "me" or "we", but "THEM", Humanity can't be that bad, can it (?), so therefore someone or something else has to take up the slack, to become the witch or the incubus or the - alien. This habit of finger-pointing and demonizing has been around for so long that it seems inseparable from the human condition.

I don't know if it's a reaction to fear, however, so much as a way to get ourselves off the hook. Fear we can deal with, or think we can. It has always struck me as a curious thing how much humankind loves having the giblets scared out of it - look at the whole horror film industry, with people paying perfectly good money to be shocked, squeamed, squicked, even horrified. Those are all extremely uncomfortable feelings, are they not? And don't most people prefer being in a state of comfort? Don't they go out of their way to achieve such a state (alcohol, cigarettes, too much TV)? I'm just askin'. 

We obviously evolved with the need to make a quick exit whenever a predator suddenly appeared (the worst predators undoubtedly being other human beings).Was that flash of raw terror necessary for the human race to keep on moving forward (in a manner of speaking - though since Roswell, I think we've been moving backwards)? Is THAT where we first developed our addiction to having the jeezly Jesus scared out of us? It must have come from somewhere.

It was weird to find this thing again, because it had no identifying marks on it that I remembered. I didn't recall the name Art Bell, the content of the call, or the fact that the transmission suddenly went dead. I just remembered a very strange video with a black screen, no picture, and someone in a lot of distress. Maybe a radio show or something like that? Things are amazingly easy to find on the internet, however, so with a few almost random search terms, the thing popped up again.

Not true, however, of psychic bridging, another mystery I want to deal with once I figure out what to say about it. Back in about 2009, while researching The Glass Character,  I came across a very strange web site and an even stranger video - both of which have vanished without a trace - which purported to explain a very bizarre form of time travel sanctioned by the government during the Cold War. Moreover, Harold Lloyd was directly involved and suffered disastrous consequences. If there's any grain of truth in it at all, I could sell it to the conspiracy theorists and retire in eternal comfort. 

POST-BLOG. As so often happens, I have a few more things to say. That psychic bridging web site/video was one of the strangest things I've ever seen. In almost every case, no matter how weird the subject matter, you can google a topic and find SOMETHING on it. Not so in this case. I realize now I should have cut and pasted and printed out the content, which I probably could have done, but it was just so freaky that I kept avoiding it. The video was long and strange and, frankly, boring. It starred a dull young Englishman from an industrial town (the accent) called Paul Simon - not "that" Paul Simon. (Can't find that, either.) He went on and on about experiences he had with psychic bridging. I don't know how this relates to remote viewing because I really don't have much familiarity with it. All that tin-foil-hatted/Jiffy Pop-headed stuff does kind of make me disgusted, or at least extremely skeptical, because there are lots of nuts and fanatics out there who seem to WANT the world to come to an end. Maybe they crave excitement, like that Wallenda guy who seems to want to go on and on until he's half an inch deep on the pavement like his ill-fated granddad on that YouTube video.

So if there was or is such a thing as psychic bridging, and if it really is a form of armchair time travel (i. e. you don't exactly physically GO to these eras, but envision or view them from the present), what happened to it? Was it an experiment that failed? The Jiffy Pop-head league might seem so absurd as to be completely dismissable, until you look into the LSD experiments of the Cold War. Some of these were methods of keeping soldiers awake for days and days, but some of it was an elaborate form of spying. So imagine the possibilities of going back in time and spying on them Russkies before they even dropped the fat one on us! Maybe we could even do something about it, to make them stop. Better yet, look into the future to see what they WILL be up to. Sounds good, doesn't it?

But there are problems.

What would be the freak-out margin of someone going back in time from the comfort of their armchair and seeing THEMSELVES scurrying around, doing all the things they did in the past? What if you discovered you had the power to "bend" those actions somehow, to change the past - and here we run smack up against the time travel paradox that always makes me go "oh for Christ's sake" when I read science fiction novels.

It's a riddle trapped within an enigma inside a pickle jar. My husband is a certified Big Bang Theory-type scientist who knows all this stuff to a degree that is a little bit spooky. Over the years, he has evolved into a sort of science Yoda, folding philosophy into pure science through long reflection and experience. I sometimes ask him science questions, though one time he made me cry just by talking about Einstein's theories. I just couldn't help it, it was so beautiful and terrifying. Not long ago, I asked him in a come-on-it-can't-really-be-true way if you could really be in two places at the same time, and he said, "Oh, yes, of course you can. Theoretically, it's quite possible." In quantum physics, a particle can actually exist in two places simultaneously. Then I envisioned the alarming possibility of meeting yourself and wondering (as in Star Trek and so many other sci-fi dramas ) "which is the real Captain Kirk".

I didn't want to spend much more time on that subject, but I had to ask him about that related subject: time travel. "Yes, it's quite possible," he said, and if my hair could stand on end like Harold's, it would have. Time and space, he explained to me, are not etched in straight lines but infinitely curved. The folds can touch each other and double back like switchbacks in a road or river. And then there are wormholes! Like black holes, they really do exist. I knew it was true that an astronaut comes back from a space voyage younger than when he left, and if this went on for long enough we might see a fetus in a jar rather than a grown man. Time, like all the other immutable "laws" of physics, might not be the straight-ahead boring thing we assume.

I am reminded of Wiggs Dannyboy, the Timothy Leary-like "immortalist" of Tom Robbins' masterpiece Jitterbug Perfume, who claimed that the universe doesn't have laws: "It has habits. And habits," he went on to explain, "can be broken."

So I don't know if Harold Lloyd went nuts over Cold War experiments, but I do know that he had a fervent desire to serve his country which up to then had been thwarted by the severe injury to his right hand. (And that whole accident/bomb thing was murky, too. A plot by Charlie Chaplin to blow up his rival? After all, he turned out to be a flaming Communist, not to mention a statutory rapist.) As a magician and the highest muck-a-muck in the Shriners (Imperial Potentate - could there be a more Freemasony/Illuminati-ish name than that??), he may well have been open to alternate realities and the expansion of human consciousness. Or not - maybe it was just an accident.

Some nut, some Paul Simon wanna-be may have made up psychic bridging, or hallucinated it, or specifically cited Harold Lloyd for obscure reasons of his own. But he did mention that the breakdown occurred while HL was "filming" in the 1940s. Yes, he did make his last film in the 1940s, and it was a disaster, taken over by the increasingly weird machinations of its producer, Howard Hughes. (Do you hear the theme from The Twilight Zone? That strange popping sound on the stove?). The way he described it was: "Actor Harold Lloyd became self-detached during filming in the 1940s and was hospitalized."  That's all.

So did his brethren in the Freemason/Shriner community help him out there? What happened exactly, or did any of it happen at all? Probably not, but it's an odd one. The fact it all vanished is also odd. I do remember bits and pieces of the rest of it, something about spirit entities getting trapped in cell phones. Not a common belief in anyone except major psychotics. I remember when email was new, everyone seemed to think there was something mystical and a little intimidating about it. Someone wrote a popular novel, an absurd thing about a woman who began to receive emails from a mystic in the 17th century.

Oh no!

The movie version didn't fly, though for a while it looked like it might. Reminds me of the bristling paranoia in the old Twilight Zone series, with computers taking up a whole room, rattling and whirring in a menacing manner and sometimes even talking, not in the slightly fey and sinister manner of HAL in Kubrick's 2001, but sounding more like Mr. Ed or My Mother the Car.  Reams of paper would spew out like vomit, covered with earth-shattering messages of doom. Technology was coming, and it was the end of the world as we knew it.

And, as a matter of fact, it was.

POST-POST BLOG. Maybe it's the pale light of reason the next day - I don't know. But when you play the Art Bell Area 51 call again, it sounds phony. It sounds like bad acting. There WAS someone who called in later to say "I'm the Area 51  caller", but the voice didn't sound the same at all, leading the Jiffy Pop crowd to cry "Coverup! Conspiracy!" So now I don't know what to think. I don't know much about Art Bell's program except that it was extremely hokey. And they went through a suspiciously large among of Reynold's Wrap.

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(and this is the kicker): Lord forgive me for adding to this, but it has been a while since I've written at length. My blog does not live by gifs alone, though you'd never know it sometimes. I found some interesting stuff on Wikipedia about the influence on pop culture of the infamous Area 51 call:

• This incident formed the basis of the song "Faaip de Oiad" by the rock band Tool which features said interview (with Art Bell's part cut out) dubbed in over frantic drumming and buzzing static.
• The interview was also sampled in Konkhra's track "Religion is a Whore", The Faceless's "Planetary Duality", experimental Texas quartetThe Paper Chase's "It's Out There and It's Gonna Get You", MC Lars' "Lars Attacks!" and Sweet Valley's "So Serene" (around the 22:40 mark).

Anyway, this is what I found in WIkipedia. I've listened to them all, and yes, they do exploit this poor gasping sobbing man (or actor - I swear it sounds actorish to me now) in all SIX recordings. Most of them aren't listenable to me, so I won't bother posting them.

Just ONE more eekie fact, which I found out on the Wiki entry for Art Bell: the mysterious Area 51 call was made in 1997. . . on September 11.