Archive for March, 2010
Wild Animals in the City: My Fascination
New York City is a long way from Eugene, Oregon, but this story has my interest for these reasons: it’s related to my earlier post about coyotes seen in residential areas in Newport, Oregon, on the coast (literally, coyotes on the beach), and I’m interested in stories of wild animals interfacing with humans, or, vice versa.
Also, it seems that in the past few years, stories of known animals — meaning, mundane, recognizable creatures as compared to unknown, anomalous, cryptid types — behaving more boldly as well as more strangely, have increased. I noticed this pattern about ten, twelve years ago. For some reason I started collecting news clippings and stories of strange animal behaviors. When I told one of my professors about this he agreed it was certainly interesting, but wanted to know so what; what was I going to do with these stories, why was I collecting them? “Because they’re cool and weird” wasn’t enough of a motivation. Well, I still don’t know what I want to do with these stories, except to share them, for now.
So, we have coyotes in New York city. Part of my fascination of stories like this is the juxtaposition of humans, especially in places so seemingly out of touch with “the wild,” even though “the wild,” may be less than fifty miles away. Well dressed people eating perfect food in lovely places, and two blocks away are coyotes. Or deer, or bear or wolverines or cougars or . . .
Even in places not so la de dah as New York City, like Newport, Oregon, the juxtaposition still fascinates. Newport is a funky yet somewhat large beach town, (not a criticism) where, however, “gentrification” is going on in some areas. Expensive condos and too too cute and over priced shops are shoved up against older and poorer homes, often in disrepair. And just a few miles away from the touristy beach spots are the rural areas; some poor, some with one way glass windows wrapping around beautiful homes atop hills, and some in between. Add to this the presence of animals coming down from the hills, or out of the forests, onto the boardwalks and surrounding neighborhoods seems like both poetic justice in some ways, as well as tragic for the animals. Obviously their presence is a sign of what’s happening to their environment and the effect that has on the animals.
Well that was gloomy. I didn’t intend it to turn out that way, it just did. Maybe it’s because right now it’s a dark, rainy, windy cold day here in Oregon. Not at all unusual for western Oregon, true. . .
So, back to the coyotes in New York. This recent news items tells about a captured coyote in the city: Not wily enough: Cops corral roving Tribeca coyote along West Side Highway.
New York’s runaway coyote has been corralled.
The elusive animal was finally nabbed in Tribeca on Thursday after cops found it in a parking lot near the West Side Highway.
“He didn’t seem too Wily by the time we found him,” said Detective James Coll, who collared the coyote with Detective Robert Mirfield.
Limo driver Ralph Rothstein, 63, who witnessed the capture, said the creature “had one ear up and one ear down, like a cartoon character, and didn’t know which way to go.
“I was reading about it earlier in the day then, all of a sudden, I see the coyote and I couldn’t believe it…It looked scared,” he added.
Naturally the poor thing was scared! Fortunately the coyote is in the hands of animal caretakers and will be released into the wild. Other coyotes have been seen — and captured — in New York City over the last five years or so.
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2010/03/25/2010-03-25_not_wiley_enough_cops_corral_roving_tribeca_coyote_along_west_side_highway.html#ixzz0jIfHWU3N
Light Behaving Oddly, and the ‘Toledo Donuts’
The blogThe Big Studyhas an interesting piece on the behavior of light; anomalous, high strangeness and unexplained events having to do with light. Included in the article is a bit about the Reeves case from the 1960s in the Newport-Toledo area on the Oregon coast. Called the Reeves case, the Toledo lights case, etc. or the Toledo Donuts… Keel wrote about this and a few mentions can be found here and there. To this day, the event reamains unexplained.
A possible explanation, in my opinion, is a military test of classified technology. UFO sightings were happening all over the area; and the navy and research facilities have a strong presence there. On the other hand, the Reeves case echoes other strange, out of place type “aliens,” type encounters. Maybe there is no rational explanation; it just is one more of those strange visitations that pop in from the “Goblin Universe,” (Holiday) or “Daemonic Reality,” (Harpur) or Trickster realm. (Hansen.)
Cougars Close to Home; Very Close to Home. . .
The other day I posted about the coyote population inside the city limits of the coastal town of Newport, Oregon. In fact, as I wrote, a coyote has been seen by several people on the street over from my mother’s house. For whatever reason I never thought of coyotes in the area, certainly not right in town, a couple blocks from the touristy Nye Beach area. Deer are common, and there was the black bear story awhile back along the Yaquina River (woman was sentenced to leave her home and not return to the area for feeding a large population of black bears.)
Much closer to home, as in no more than five miles from here, a report in the local paper about cougar in the well traveled Spencer’s Butte park. That location is heavily used by hikers, bikers, nature lovers, etc. From the Register Guard, the area’s newspaper:
<a href=”http://www.registerguard.com/csp/cms/sites/web/news/cityregion/24574682-41/butdorf-butte-cougar-cougars-sign.csp”> Hazardous hike | Warning signs are posted after hikers spot three cougars while climbing Spencer Butte </a>
They did what they were supposed to do. They didn’t run. They walked slowly. They shouted. Loud and often.“My whole body was full of adrenaline,” said Julie Butdorf, a University of Oregon student who was hiking Spencer Butte about 6:30 a.m. Wednesday with fellow student and roommate Jenna Rosenfeld when they came upon what they are sure was a cougar a few feet off the trail. And then another. And another.
“There were at least three of them,” Butdorf said.
They made it safely back to their car and called the authorities, who ended up posting a warning sign in the area.
There’s been a lot of controversy in this area about laws pertaining to cougar hunting, especially trap laws and the use of dogs in hunting cougar. No doubt this incident will bring the issue up yet again.
Cougar in the Spencer Butte area are “rare,” according to ODFW’s Brian Wolfer. However, the agency gets reports of cougar sightings in theresidential streets around the park. (A few years ago the paper had a photograph of a cougar in a tree on the University of Oregon campus; much closer to home than Spencer Butte park!)
Warning have been issued to stay out of the park, and signs put up about cougar. Yet human nature demonstrates that some people either have no fear, are too thrilled by the possibility of spotting a cougar up close, or, excuse me, stupid:
The warning signs didn’t stop folks from hiking the butte later Wednesday, although most went with caution.
“Where’s the sign?” said Myke Leopold of Marcola. “I need to read it.” Leopold, who’s hiked the butte a half-dozen times, brought along a friend Wednesday, Victoria Aguirre of Medford, who was getting set to hike the 2,065-foot butte for the first time.
“It’s daytime,” Aguirre said. “They usually come out at night, right?”
True, according to ODFW’s Brian Wolfer (and note the Fortean name game of his last name) and, cougars don’t usually attack humans, yet they have.
This one really got me:
Kerry Lennartz, also a UO student, heard about the sighting from a friend Wednesday morning. But that didn’t stop her from taking her weekly walk with her dog, Rozzie, a Shiba Inu. “It’s the middle of the day, so I figured it would be OK,” Lennartz said.
Besides, she’s worked with wildcats at a rescue center in her home state of Indiana, she said. She’s even touched a cougar.
“They’re really sweet in captivity,” Lennartz said. “They purr.”
“In captivity” animals are different than they are in the wild, and I’m not so sure about bringing a dog into the mix. I’m staying out of the park, not that I go up there much anyway, except to look for UFOs. The Spencer Butte area is also known as a Eugene UFO hot spot; and, in fact, I’ve seen a few UFOs in that area over the years.
Medford, Oregon: ‘Thought Police’ on the Job
Thanks go to the blog piglipstick, where I acknowledge lifting items from on a daily basis. (If you haven’t visited piglipstick be sure you do so.)
So, piglipstick alerts us to an item out of Medford, Oregon, courtesy of Information Liberation:
Oregon Officials Consult Precogs, Arrest Man for Bloody Shooting Spree That Killed Four Next Week
Yes, you read that right: “that killled four next week.” How could that happen, you ask? Have we discovered time travel? Not yet, but various law agencies got together and decided a “recently laid-off employee” from the Oregon Dept. of Transportation was “disgruntled” enough to cause suspicion. The man had bought three guns and this, combined with his termination and the “red flags” raised by co-workers, led authorities to arrest the man (on exactly what charges?) and send him off for a psych eval. As one law enforcement spokesperson said:
“Instead of being reactive, we took a proactive approach.”
As the article comments, maybe this man was indeed ready to do something horrendous, and possibly lives were saved. The obvious shouldn’t have to be stated, but here it goes. As pointed out in the Information Liberation piece:
But there’s a phrase we use to describe the sort of society where the police can come into your home, arrest you, commit you to a mental facility, and confiscate your legally-obtained property on no more than a hunch that you might commit some crime in the near future.
Redwood Bigfoot Carving
Coast to Coast shares a photo of a large redwood carving of a Bigfoot made for a new bar and grill opening in Kerby, Oregon.
Kerby is in Southern Oregon, Josephine County, near the California border. Population: 400.
The bar owner says the Bigfoot carving needs a name; “maybe listeners can help.” Visit Coast to Coast if you feel creative.
Coyotes in Newport
Visiting mom today in Newport (which is on the central coast) she tells us of a coyote hanging out on the street up from hers. Mom lives literally across the street from the ocean, up a hill, in the Nye Beach area. The coyote has been seen by several people in the area.
The Oregonian’s Lori Tobias, in a September 2009 article, wrote of the coyote population in the area: Newport: Coyotes on the increase along the coast
NEWPORT – No one realized Amber was missing until Sheila Sammons got the call on Sunday morning: a neighbor had found her cat’s collar.
“I knew right away something was very wrong,” said Sammons. “I thought there’d been a cat fight and that I would find her injured in the bushes.”
Instead, Sammons would discover Amber had fallen prey to wild animals she didn’t even know inhabited the area; one whose numbers are unusually high this year — coyotes.
“We’ve had a lot of calls about coyotes this year,” said Doug Cottam , a wildlife biologist in the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Newport office. “It has been a good year for the survival of the young. The conditions were good, mild and a little wetter.”
Complaints about the animals, reputed for their clever but cautious ways, have long been common on parts the central coast.
“In the past, in Lincoln City in particular, there were numerous coyotes that were tame and habituated to people,” said Cottam. “We’ll get calls from tourists and there’ll be coyotes on the beach, and they are fairly unafraid.”
Usually, when I’m at the coast, I’m busy looking for agates and UFOs. Now I have to add coyotes to my list.
Staged Events: Eliciting “Accurate Emotional Response” in Students
Since 9/11, the United Kingdom has been a land where a bizarre blend of an Orwell/Kafka tinged atmosphere of fascist laws, bureaucrats obsessed with minutia of the mundane, and overt, heavy handed laws and practices rule. I’ve often commented that what goes on in England in particular is the prototype for what soon appears over here. Maybe altered slightly to blend in with American culture; ease itself into our lives so we don’t even notice, but, present. Creepy, sucking your soul out of you, keeping you in the glided cage present. The UK is the playground of the industrial military globalists, no doubt about it.
Staged and scary events in schools in England, the United States, and most recently, Scotland, are one of these chillingly bizarre actions perpetuated by whatever forces are behind these post 9/11 games. Parents are not notified of these little scenarios, which are enacted in ways that have students believe it’s really happening. Teachers, sometimes with the complicity of local law enforcement, blithely manifest scenes as if they’re actual events. For some interesting reasons and one with no doubt all kinds of hidden motivations, England staged several fake (but said to be real to the students) UFO crashes, complete with missing — “abducted” — teachers and dead aliens.(I wrote about the odd crashed UFO scenarios for UFO Digest in August of 2009: My Teacher Was Abducted By Aliens: Preparation for Fake Disclosure? )
The latest of these fake events: a Holocaust themed scenario, at St. Hilary’s Primary in Scotland:
Students were “hysterical” after deputy head teacher Elizabeth McGlynn segregated nine youngsters in Gerry Blair’s P7 class and told them they were being taken away from their families.
The purpose of this was to give students an idea of what victims of the Holocaust went through:
insight into the horrors of the Holocaust as part of a project they are doing about the Second World War.
The teacher, Mrs. McGlyn, told students:
she had a letter from the Scottish Government saying nine children had to be separated from their classmates.
She told the shocked youngsters those who were born in January, February and March had lower IQs than other children, ‘due to lack of sunlight in their mother’s womb’, and that they had to put yellow hats on and be sent to the library.
When one child asked if that meant they might have to go to an orphanage, they were told that might be a possibility. At that point many of the children became very distressed. One boy kicked his chair over, one was angry and demanded to speak to someone in charge but most were crying on a scale ranging from mildly to severely.
The students were then told, after about fifteen minutes, that it was all an exercise and not really happening, but that the role playing would continue.
Now here’s the really interesting thing. When a parent, furious at the school for allowing such a thing, asked why anyone in authority thought this was a good idea, she was told:
they didn’t inform the children beforehand because they wanted the children to experience an ‘accurate emotional response’ to this scenario in order for it to be reflected in their story writing.
This was the same reason given in other staged scenarios, that, and to encourage critical thinking. Usually these exercises are embedded in creative writing courses. Eliciting emotional response from children seems to be the goal. Why? What is the real agenda? Under the guise of fostering creative writing skills or encouraging imaginative thinking, eliciting intense emotional states from children is the objective.
The school defends the role play, downplaying the impact on students — and parents:
Schools commonly engage in drama-based exercises which encourage children to use their imagination and act out a character. These role play situations are designed to help children understand diversity and develop empathy for the victims of prejudice and are usually very well received by pupils.
The shared facts of these staged events:
* Students are led to think these events are real
* Sometimes local law enforcement is in on the staged event
* Frightening and violent themes are chosen: crashed UFOs, dead aliens, missing humans, the threat of being kidnapped, etc.
* By the authorities own admission, the goal is to have children “to experience an ‘accurate emotional response’ to these events.
What is the hidden goal behind the need to generate intense emotional reactions of fear, hysteria, and anger from children? Who determines what is an “accurate” reaction?
What happens if a student doesn’t respond “accurately?”
Military Interest in Students: Pt. Pleasant
In some ways, the above staged events reminds me of what Mothman researcher (and experiencer) Andrew Colvin has to say about the military’s interest in students in the Pt. Pleasant, and West Virginia areas. I don’t have the references at hand, but I recall Colvin writing in one of his books that the military took an intense interest in students in rural communities in those areas; and that, statistically, many students were what we’d call gifted, or at least, scoring higher than they should have. Another interesting tidbit: Charles Manson lived there as a child.
While no staged events took place in schools there (as far as I know, and not unless you consider Mothman a staged event, which I don’t know if it was or not, though I don’t think so) the fact that the military took an active interest in student performance raises the same red flags as the current staged scenarios we’re hearing about today.
Notes:
St Hilary’s Primary kids traumatized by teachers’ Holocaust game
My Teacher Was Abducted By Aliens: Preparation for Fake Disclosure?
Follow-up: Staged Alien Events and Schools
Night of the Living Jackboots
Andrew Colvin
La Pine, OR UFO Sighting From December ‘09
From Peter Davenport’s NUFORC, a report from December of 2009 out of La Pine, in eastern Oregon, of several UFOs, as well as fighter jets. Read report here.
1947: A Very Good Year
My new Trickter’s Realm column is now up at Tim Binnall’s website. Titled 1947: A Very Good Year, where I look at the grouchy ‘tude some have towards Roswell and related events.
Swine Flu Signals: Come On Down!
Two odd little things recently in my community concerning the swine flu. The initial hysteria and swine flu as lead news has quited awhile ago, but there is still the constant low hum of the news stream bringing us swine flu news and propaganda.
I was in line at the pharmacy the other day, and while waiting I noticed a small sign in the window about the swine flu vaccine. I’m paraphrasing but it basically looked something like this:
H1N1 Vaccines Here! No waiting! No appointment neccesary!
H1N1 Vaccinations Available For All
see if you are eligble to receive the H1N1 vaccine
Vaccine not available at this pharmacy. Please visit our Elm Street pharmacy for vaccinations.
I wondered why the vaccine is available for all, but you had to check to see if you could take it, and why the sign read that you could get it at my pharmacy, but they were out, you had to actully go a different pharmacy to get vaccinated. I took a picture of the sign with my digital. I checked my menu to make sure the image was there; it was. When I went to show the image to Jim, it was gone. We both looked but it wasn’t in the camera. No, I’m not suggesting alien reptilians were responsible, just a weird little thing. No doubt I hit the delete button or something while putting the camera away.
A few days later, Jim tells me that he saw a man in front of the Public Health Department on 6th waving a large sign. The sign read (paraphrasing again):
Come on in! Get your FREE Swine Flu vaccine here!
As Jim commented, they really want us to get vaccinated.




