Category: paranormal

Day 1: Drain Grate Intact

So far so good. After I affixed the drain grate to the corrugated base with a worm gear adjustable clamp, this morning the lid is still on.

I also posted a tiny zombie guard. He’ll chew up anything that tries to come up from below or break in from above. He’s not fussy about what he eats. He doesn’t sleep. He’s not scared of anything. Bad weather doesn’t bother him. He says the same thing Beetlejuice says:

“I’ll eat anything you want me to eat, I’ll swallow anything you want me to swallow; so, come on down, I’ll chew on a dog!”

Extraterrestrials Need Lentils Anonymous Program

Sena bought a bag of Spicy Sriracha Lentil Chips yesterday. They’re at the center of an extraterrestrial news flash on the web site of the company, The Daily Crave, which sells a lot of healthier snack food items. They’re mainly plant-based.

Apparently, extraterrestrials are known to have a tendency to get addicted to lentils. What proves this beyond a shadow of a doubt is that the website listing for The Daily Crave is directly below the website listing for the Reddit description of the Star Trek: Next Generation episode (S01E19) which details the sale of lentils to aliens. Lentils are a highly addictive drug to extraterrestrials, although they tend to bore me—and a lot of other snackers. Funny, I can’t find anything about it in the Wikipedia entry for that 1988 episode entitled “Coming of Age.” And I didn’t watch it.

Can you beat that? I love science!

The Daily Crave news item (“Crop Circles coincide with missing new snack displays”) on the website differs from what’s on our bag, which has the headline “Missing Snack Displays Blamed on Aliens.”

There’s also a Lentils meme for the Ancient Aliens hair guy, Giorgio Tsoukalos. It’s like almost all of the memes: a picture of him with his wild hair and a weird fake quote. This one has the word “Lentils” on it. What more proof do you need to support government funding of a Lentils Anonymous (LA) program for aliens?

On the other hand, you have to wonder whether dusting a little sriracha on lentil chips would make them taste zestier instead of just making me load them up with chip dip, a substance known to instantaneously transform humans into aliens.

There are also several flavors for Quinoa Chips (pronounced KEEN-wah). Quinoa is also very good for you. Contrary to popular belief, Himalayan Salt Quinoa Chips will not grow hair on your chest, according to many extraterrestrial scientists.

Update on Attic Weirdness

This is an update on the attic, the hatch for which is in our garage ceiling. We haven’t heard any knocking noises lately.

Yesterday, the HVAC guys came to reattach the duct which somehow separated from the roof vent. They showed up at 7:00 a.m. and were pretty much done in 20 minutes. They charged close to $300, which Sena is still complaining about.

Now we’re wondering how the two repairmen fixed it without dragging another tall ladder into the attic. The picture suggests that reattaching the duct and the roof vent involved either levitation or aliens—possibly both.

The roof vent looks like it’s above the floor of the attic by about 12 feet. We couldn’t see exactly how it was done because we didn’t climb up the repairmen’s ladder. The view was limited by angle of the hatchway and the darkness.

I checked the before and after pictures (the after picture was taken by one of the repairmen) of the duct repair job. Sometimes paranormal images take a while to develop, a phenomenon well described by goofball UFO researchers high on intergalactic substances dropped by intoxicated aliens careening in out-of-control, souped up space ships blundering through one of the many wormhole vortices commonly located near fast food joints.

Sure enough, aliens were clearly involved in vandalizing the duct which they were too drunk to realize is not another wormhole but the connection between the kitchen exhaust hood and the roof vent. They looked dazed and confused.

After the repair, it sure looks like an alien was involved in climbing up the wall studs to reattach the high end of the duct. He’s obviously sneaking back down the wall. It looks like levitation is the key.

The big question is how would this creature know the city code covering proper ventilation duct installation? And another question is how did it get a job with the HVAC company?

The HVAC guys were astounded by how many nails were in the walls in the attic. They’re clearly visible. Somebody went wild with a nail gun. I’m not saying it’s aliens—but it’s aliens.

They also found a walkie talkie in the attic. We’ve never owned walkie talkies. I don’t know where it came from, but I’m guessing aliens were using them to phone home. Could that account for the knocking noises? Maybe they communicate by knocking through the walkie talkies, just to throw us off. I think they got the idea from Tony Orlando and Dawn: “Knock 3 times on the ceiling if you’re homesick….”

These and other questions await further analysis by goofball UFO experts. You’re welcome.

Why Do We Want to Believe?

I heard a song called “Marfa Lights” on the KCCK 88.3 FM radio program, the Friday Night Blues Show with John Heim aka Big Mo. The lyrics mention the Marfa Lights, describing them as UFOs or flying saucers. It was the first time I ever heard a blues song mentioning UFOs.

I looked it up later on the web. It turns out there’s a town called Marfa in Texas where people see strange lights. Years ago (and maybe even nowadays) a lot of them think they might be UFOs or some other paranormal phenomenon, like ghosts. A couple of studies in 2004 and 2008 pretty much debunked them as automobile lights triggered by atmospheric changes like temperature inversions. Still, some people want to believe they’re something weird or cosmic.

On the same evening I heard the song, I watched an episode of Ancient Aliens which is one of those shows which has a paranormal theme, mostly involving aliens. They talked about a blind seer named Baba Vanga, whose predictions about the future are thought to be 80% accurate. The speculation by the hosts of the show is that Baba Vanga might have been tapping into a phenomenon called the Akashic Record.

Encyclopedia Britannica on the web says the Akashic Record is said to be a “…compendium of pictorial records, or ‘memories,’ of all events, actions, thoughts, and feelings that have occurred since the beginning of time.” (Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Akashic record”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 29 Jan. 2015, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Akashic-record. Accessed 13 August 2022.)

It’s not a physical thing, but it sounds like an ethereal public library. The Ancient Alien enthusiasts suggest that anyone can access it, even aliens (of course!)—if you have a current, valid library card and don’t have any overdue books or have at least paid up all the fines you owe.

In fact, there are a lot of entries on the web claiming you can access the Akashic Record just by formulating a clear question, like “What does Kellogg really put in those so-called all natural Kashi Granola Bars—and what exactly is Pyridoxine Hydrochloride anyway?”

Then you have to get into a pretty deep meditative state, which is nothing like mindfulness meditation. You need to ask really specific questions and insist on talking to the head librarian if you start to get the run around about certain resources being on reserve only for high-level professional mediums who charge outrageously high fees to search the record for you.

People want to believe. That’s why you can even find a WikiHow with detailed instructions for tapping into the Akashi Record to check out any of the episodes from the first season of the X-Files.

The Akashic Record might even have the Cliff Notes on what is going to happen to humans in the remote future. Ancient Aliens guys seem to spin this a couple of different ways.

One is a version of the matrix theory, which means that we’re living in some kind of computer simulation run by aliens who set this up with a special code or script that absolutely must be followed—meaning that the future is strictly determined. That would be bad because it sounds like it ends with a tremendous nuclear explosion on Mars, which humans eventually colonize but then can’t get along with each other because there are not enough rib joints for both humans and aliens.

The other future scenario is that humans evolve into beings who can tolerate indefinitely prolonged deep space exploration and go planet-hopping for the rest of eternity looking for Douglas Adams’ restaurant at the end of the universe. Forget getting in if you don’t have a reservation.

Maybe the question for the Akashic Record keepers should be pretty basic.

Why do we want so hard to believe?

Should We Smudge the Attic?

We never did figure out what was making the knocking noise in our attic.  I guess we’ll have to find out what to do about it. We did get the ladder and check out the attic, though.

As a general rule, animals don’t knock. They usually lack good manners, especially the Chupacabra and its cousins. And I can’t figure out what a wild creature would eat up there, unless it likes insulation.

I tossed an old fruitcake through the hatch to distract the werewolf, demon or zombie or whatever might be haunting the place. I figured that would probably kill it or at least the candied fruit would gum up his fangs so bad his jaws would stick closed.

It was pretty dark up there. We didn’t hear any knocking, but we did notice a disconnected duct. We’ve scheduled a fix with a local HVAC company.

We might have to Smudge the attic. I looked this up on the web. It’s a way to spiritually cleanse a house. You can use burnt sage or other substances which you have to light with a match or a lighter (which you could accidentally drop)—something I’m not sure I want to do in an attic when it’s hot and dry and there’s a lot of insulation and wood all over the place.

You end up with a lot of smudges that way—from a fire.

Anyway, you’re supposed to work your way around the attic from right of the entrance all the way around counterclockwise until you get the left side of the entrance.

We have attic hatch that is about 22’’ x 30.’’ It’s a long way around the attic. It’s pretty big and some things can hide under the abundant insulation—like giant pythons, which can go a long time between meals.

Snakes don’t knock; they lunge, strike, and coil. And if they’re possessed by a demon, they’re not usually impressed by how hot it can get in an attic.

This is why the HVAC repair person is waiting a while before coming out to our house. They try to avoid doing work in attics in the summer heat—not because they’re afraid of pythons. Python wrestling is just part of the job.

This gives us a little time to work out a smudge technique that doesn’t involve adding things like heat and smoke to the attic. That reminds me. You’re supposed to open up windows to let the smoke out. There aren’t any windows in our attic. Come to think of it, do any attics have windows?

It turns out there are smokeless cleansing methods—that don’t involve sprinkling Copenhagen all over the joint.

You can bang on pots and pans or ring bells. This can wake up the neighbors, who might call the police.

You can dust and vacuum and mop, but I’m not keen on cleaning up the attic. Attics are just the right places for large piles of insulation, dirt, and shadows—which can hide werewolves.

 You can make a spray out of stovetop potpourri, which might be a mistake because it could draw people from miles around who think you’re throwing a cheese and wine party.

You could open some windows to let in light but not in our attic, unless we knock out a few walls. Vampires don’t care for bright lights and might take offense.

Magical sweeping with an ordinary broom might work, but it would just make a cloud of insulation particles and make you sneeze—which could startle the werewolf, who would then rip your lungs out.

I think we’ll just stay out of the attic for now.

TV with Heart

The other night I watched a show I’ve seen 3 times and it still makes me want to cry. It’s the Heavy Rescue 401 episode with Bear the heavy wrecker operator with the Ross company who lets an 8-year-old boy diagnosed with cancer hold the steering wheel and pull the horn as they take a drive around the farm where the family lives.

They hug and it’s tough to tell whether Bear is comforting the boy or the other way around. I guess it’s both.

I saw a Facebook page about the boy, who succumbed to cancer a few years ago. People are still leaving warm messages.

I watch a fair amount of TV and I make fun of most of it, including the paranormals. They’re pretty formulaic, re-investigating decades old cases that never get solved about alien visitors in spaceships, leaving behind evidence that goes missing from government storage warehouses. Because it gets lost, nobody has to explain why there is a notable lack of any convincing evidence for what most UFOs are and who might be flying them.

I can’t generate much emotion for the paranormals. I mostly laugh at them. How can you lose or throw out physical evidence of UFOs and aliens so many times?

“We need to make more room in here; can we toss something in the trash compactor?”

“Sure, get rid of those photos of military personnel taking selfies with aliens driving UFOs and drinking beer. That’ll make room for the 400-page binders of the syllabus for the graduate school course ‘Effect of Chimpanzee Eyebrow Dandruff on Prime Interest Rates During the 20th Century.’”

One of paranormal shows did an extensive review of the Kecksburg, Pennsylvania UFO, the one shaped like a macadamia. No wait, it was shaped like an acorn. It was dark and brooding, full of intrigue, veiled threats, and an alien pilot. As usual, evidence was lost.

Did you know Kecksburg throws an annual UFO-themed party? They just had the 17th Kecksburg UFO Festival just last month, replete with something called a burnout contest, fireworks, and crafts. The people of Kecksburg aren’t letting the government conspiracy get them down. They’re more than happy to let the paranormal producers visit because it gives the town leaders a chance to draw more tourists to the area.

I get a kick out of Men in Black (MIB) too, and I won’t tell you how many times I’ve seen the first one and the first two sequels. In Men in Black, Agent K shows the new recruit, Agent J, a special universal translator and says MIB is not even supposed to have it and says, “I’ll tell you why. Human thought is so primitive it’s looked upon as an infectious disease in some of the better galaxies.”

That’s why it helps to watch some other TV shows, the ones with heart where real people who are not acting but living do the mundane things which are seldom the most treasured of miracles. They remind you of the better human qualities like humor, kindness, love, generosity, gratitude, and the experience of sorrow that can sometimes humble a species which often suffers from overweening pride.

It can sometimes make you cry.

Is That You, Jason?

Yesterday, Sena and I were playing cribbage and we both suddenly started hearing a knocking noise which sounded like it was coming from our roof or the attic. We’ve heard a similar noise in the past, but it stopped and we forgot about it. This time it seriously interrupted our cribbage game.

It sounded like an intermittent knocking, which reminded me of some of the paranormal shows I like to watch so I can laugh at the ghost hunters scream and jump at every bump and reflection.

This knocking actually made us stop and listen intently. It sounded like it came from somewhere in the ceiling. There were several intermittent series of soft but clearly audible knocks.

I did remove my house slippers and turned the radio off so we could hear it more consistently.

Sena got a wooden spoon and tapped the ceiling 4 times in the area on the spots where the knocking noises seemed to be coming from.

Four knocks sounded, seemingly, in response. She did this a few times, but the responses seemed to become more random. This back and forth went on for a short while. The noises seemed to move around. It started in the kitchen, then moved to the pantry, next it was in the mud room. It was nearly always 4-5 distinct knocks with intermittent silence.

We were pretty sure at first that it was coming from either the roof or in the attic. But we couldn’t imagine why anyone (or anything) would be in either location.

I didn’t volunteer to check the attic. The door to it is high in the ceiling in a corner of the garage. I would have had to drag a lot of stuff out of the corner to make room enough to wrestle the adjustable ladder up to it. Let’s see, what was the other reason?

Oh yeah, I didn’t want to have a close encounter of the machete kind with Jason Voorhees.

I finally got the idea to look out our window and noticed construction workers were way down the street installing siding high up near the roof. I started to wonder whether the pounding they were doing were the source of the knocks we were hearing. Was it some kind of echo phenomenon?

I got my camera out and focused on them. They were high up on a scaffolding and were holding the vinyl siding, but I couldn’t be sure they were hammering it on the house. We couldn’t clearly prove that our knocking noises coincided with their hammering.

I tried to find out on the internet whether noises in our roof or ceiling could arise from noises occurring elsewhere. I tried to phrase it different ways, but it was hard to get anything back except the usual stuff about rafters buckling in the winter from ice, critters, water hammer due to high pressure water line valves shutting off abruptly, and other common reasons.

Anyway, the noises stopped and that seemed to be connected with the construction workers installing siding on the lower portion of the house down the street. I still think our noise was related to that.

And the most important part of this story—I won the cribbage game.

Glitch in the Matrix or Something Else?

I saw one of the paranormal shows the other night and there were a few videos supposedly demonstrating possible proof that our reality is actually a computer simulation that sometimes gets glitchy.

One of the images was a bird stopped and motionless in mid-flight. It looked like a still photo which bounced around a little. Sure, the bird was motionless—but so was everything else.

The other two were actual videos and looked more interesting. One showed a large flock of sheep that were not moving much. There was an ear or tail flip here and there so they weren’t really motionless or “frozen.”

The other video showed a pretty interesting episode of what looked like what some would call tonic immobility in a squirrel. A person was hand-feeding the squirrel nuts and it suddenly froze for a short period of time and later just snapped out of it and acted normally. I wonder how a person got a wild squirrel to take food by hand.

Both the sheep flock and squirrel videos are available on the web. Some think the sheep become still because of a change in the weather, possibly rain. There was no explanation for the squirrel freezing.

Glitch in the matrix?

The squirrel might have been displaying tonic immobility, which can occur in certain animals. Probably the best-known example is the opossum. When it senses it’s in danger from a predator, it plays dead. There’s even a saying for this, “He’s just playing ‘possum!”

You can find the immobile squirrel story on the web by searching the term “catatonic squirrel.” In the article, the squirrel is called catatonic.

Catatonia is a complex neuropsychiatric condition in humans often marked by immobility and muteness. In a small percentage of cases, people can show purposeless agitation, or automatic, stereotyped motion.

In many cases, a small dose of benzodiazepine (usually injectable) can quickly reanimate a person who has catatonia, although the improvement is often only temporary. The usual course of treatment is to look for an underlying reversible medical or psychiatric cause and to apply effective treatment quickly, which can be life-saving.

Catatonia can lead to all kinds of complications because afflicted persons can’t eat or move. Some people who recover say that they felt extremely anxious or fearful during the catatonic episode.

Catatonia in humans is not the same thing as tonic immobility, a condition that is thought to be a survival mechanism in some prey animals in response to intense fear. If they “play dead”, a predator might not notice them or might let them go. But I can see why some people speculate there might be an evolutionary link between the two conditions.

These are interesting situations, but they aren’t evidence for a glitch in the matrix.

Factual or Fictional or Felgercarb

I’ve been watching a couple of shows about Alaska that are pretty much Bigfoot tales. One of them is The Alaska Triangle and the other is Alaska Killer Bigfoot.

And when I looked on the web to find out more about the TV shows, I learned a new word, “Felgercarb” (alternate spelling “felgercarb”). It means “crap” and I read that it originated from a 1978 Battlestar Galactica episode. The word was used by a reviewer of The Alaska Triangle. He called the show felgercarb and it obviously means he had a low opinion of it.

Incidentally, I never watched Battlestar Galactica.

I remember an English professor in Texas who made it clear that fact and fiction were not distinguished from each other by simply saying that fiction is anything that is not true. After all, fiction can be about the truth in various contexts, such as science (as in science fiction), and social and economic forces. And facts are mathematical and scientific data including formulas and historically verifiable events.

On the other hand, felgercarb is distinguished from facts and fiction by being notable for being non-satirical, non-parodical writing or performances—and by being unconvincing, amateurish, and—crappy.

Just to clarify, the Bigfoot show Mountain Monsters, which I think is a parody of all the Bigfoot shows, would not be classified as felgercarb, mainly because they obviously are making fun of the Bigfoot sagas.

Anyway, both of the Alaska shows have been labelled as felgercarb (whether they use that name or not) by a significant number of viewers. I acknowledge that a lot of people like them.

One reviewer of The Alaska Triangle who identified himself as living in Alaska all his life said he had never even heard of the Alaska Triangle.

Supposedly, a lot of people have disappeared in the Alaska Triangle, the borders of which connect Anchorage, Juneau, and Utqiagvik (formerly Barrow). Bigfoot is not the only cryptid people claim to see. One bus driver says he saw a dinosaur cross a road, specifically a velociraptor, that scientists say has been extinct for about 75 million years. No tourists on the bus saw it.

This prompts the question, why did the dinosaur cross the road? Because chickens didn’t exist yet.

Actually, the question is why didn’t the bus driver snap a cell phone picture of it? Because he didn’t want to get cited for distracted driving.

Another wild story on The Alaska Triangle is a circle of mutilated animals found far from any body of water. Why the connection to water? Because one of the animals was a whale. I guess the whale was in the middle of evolving and growing lungs. Sorry, actually it was accidentally dropped from a flying saucer driven by a distracted alien scrolling for barbecue blubber recipes on his cell phone.

I guess nobody’s heard of the Iowa corn mutilation phenomenon. Every year there are reports of several ears of corn completely denuded of kernels found near cornfields. Only the cobs are left. Weirdly, explorers and paranormal researchers often don’t find them in circles, but in terrifying little piles, not uncommonly surrounded by savagely ripped beef jerky wrappers and beer bottles completely drained of all liquid.

The Alaska Killer Bigfoot is even more mystifying—or stupefyingly felgercarbish. The explorers are investigating a place abandoned many decades ago because a special breed of Bigfoot monster called Nantinaq slaughtered people and knocked over the clothesline poles, making it impossible to dry overalls and flannel shirts.

The explorers on Alaska Killer Bigfoot occasionally barf for the pleasure of viewers. Maybe it’s the Nantinaq effect or spoiled beef jerky; it’s not clear which is more likely. It’ll have to await further study by various guest experts like spirit mediums and elderly Bigfoot experts.

Buoys somehow get into the tops of trees and holes mysteriously get dug where explorers find ancient coins, which they fail to clearly identify and maybe wonder if they can buy beer with them.

I wonder if Tony Harris, host of the show The Proof is Out There, will travel to Alaska and investigate Nantinaq or the inland whale circles. That show tends to retain some skepticism and usually errs on the side of saying something is unknown rather than saying thing like “Bigfoot has been proven to make infrasound” noises.

You know, so far nobody on the Alaska Killer Bigfoot took advantage of what might be a fact of infrasound, which is that it can nauseate people and possibly make them barf.

Oops, I just made a contribution to felgercarb.