Oregon L.O.W.F.I

Posts Tagged ‘California’

Local columnist Bob Welch, who writes for the Eugene, Oregon paper The Register-Guard has an article in today’s paper about “Lawrence of Florence,” actually two camels,  in the coastal town of Florence, Oregon. (Florence is roughly fifty miles from where I live in Eugene.)

Welch often answers queries from people in the area about local history; recently someone  asked about camel rides on the coast back in the 1970s though Welch writes that there were two camels  there from 1983 to 1985.

A California couple bought over a hundred acres on the coast, some of it just sand, and that was their inspiration for the camel.  Welch reports that there were camel rides hired for entertainment from a California animal for hire entity: Movieland Animals, complete with “caretakers.”  For under $2.00 people could ride a camel on the beach.The following comment by a woman who remembers the camel rides captures the whole flavor of the coastal side show:

The size of the space was a bit disappointing; it was rather small and just off the highway. The camel looked exhausted. A guide walked the camel with a child on top around maybe a 30-foot-wide circle. I recall feeling the experience was anti-climactic.”

What ended the camel rides didn’t seem to be concern for the exploitive  nature of the coastal offering, but a neighbor who was upset with the amount of traffic caused by the camel attraction.

I wonder what happened to those camels. . .

Nick Redfern’s newest book, Contactees, discusses many of the Contactees of the contactee era in UFO history. (I’ll write a review of the book, which so far, is great reading, in future posts.) The fact that Nick has so generously included my thoughts on female Contactee Dana Howard in his book has nothing to do with my appreciation, yet it does have to do with a bit of synchronicity that Nick experienced while finishing up his book a couple of months ago, as I posted on my blog Vintage U.F.O. .

Seems Redfern is still experiencing all kinds of related weirdness in connection with his book. As he asks, are these weird things, like black helicopters over his home and other high strangeness incidents, the Trickster at work?

Visit Nick’s blog to read his comments on the synchronicities and high strangeness that’s been visiting him since his work on his book Contactees.

“The Chetco County Oregon Monster”, Marian T. Place, “On The Track of Bigfoot,” by way of Bigfoot researcher Bobbie Short and the website Bigfoot Encounters.

This story is an 1898 account of “man-animals’ (Bigfoot) in the Willow Creek area in California near the California Oregon border.

I’ve been working on exploring memories and dreams, trying to get closer to what “really” happened with these experiences. Missing time, UFOs, and other high strangeness; what is behind these events? For example: missing time. Where was I (or we, since two, and recently it’s been considered, possibly three, missing time events experienced by my husband as well,) so where were we, what was happening?! during these missing time times. The world didn’t stop while we were — where ever we were. The point is, my mind doesn’t remember but obviously things were still happening around me, us. . . the question is of course, what?

I was working on my Orange Orb column for UFO Magazine the other night (wrote a full article on one memory “dream” that I call the “bedroom radiator alien” but followed where that led me, to an earlier memory, of the following “dream.” ) Like my patio alien “dream” I had around the same age (but in a different house) this memory has stayed with me for some fifty years or so, as vivid as the day it happened. It wasn’t a dream and yet, it must have been, since it couldn’t have literally happened:

I’m flat on my back in the dead center of my bed, which I remember as being large, and white; white sheets, and just a white covering. The bedroom is lit up very bright; which I wonder at: if I’m supposed to be asleep why are all the lights on?

I am so full of happiness!!!! I have an expectant joy that is so wonderful; I know “they” are coming. I stare up at the ceiling in anticipation. The ceiling opens up, two halves move up and outwards, revealing the starry night sky.

A giant eagle — so huge it’s almost the size of the open ceiling — swoops down from the sky, to my left, and down into the bedroom, right above me. It’s come to take me up. As the eagle flies into the room I turn and see my parents, my grandmother, and some others, standing in the doorway. They seem to be stuck there; they aren’t coming into the room. They’re just watching. I’m very glad to see my father but am a little confused; he doesn’t live with us and I don’t understand why or how it is he’s here.

The eagle comes, it’s so fantastic!

It wasn’t until last night that I realized there is a Thunderbird and Mothman connection to this experience. At age five or so I didn’t know what Thunderbirds were, nor did I know anything about Mothman of course.

I started doing some research about eagles in terms of UFO accounts and before I knew it, I had found all kinds of interesting things; things that will take awhile to explore.

One thing I found that I haven’t read fully but did skim is an article for the E.L.F. Infested Spaces (ELFIS) ‘zine by Jeffrey Lewis: Idiot Stick – Whitley Strieber’s Encounters. It is very esoteric and I only mention it because of the thinking done by Lewis on the nature of dreams, memories, symbolism and connections in the context of UFOs, aliens and entities. Frankly I don’t know what to make of it but as I say, I haven’t given it the attention needed. (There is much there; this is a site that will take you in many directions. . . )

Mentioned, I think, somewhere on the Elfis site, was something about the myth of Leda and the Swan; I also found a passing reference to the Greek myth in Erik Davis’s 1993 My Favorite Martians: A UFO Epistomology — this myth in context of UFO experiences has been addressed by UFO and esoteric researchers before. The comparison of this theme of a god like being or entity (Zeus), disguised as an animal that is familiar to humans, coming from the skies to have sexual relations with a human female to alien-UFO abduction and contactee accounts is an obvious one to explore in terms of alien-UFO stories.

I am not suggesting my memory had anything to do with anything so literal or sexual — but the comparisons and connections, all those glittering threads that reveal themselves when going tumbling down the rabbit hole of esoterica — are natural ones to follow for Fortean junkies like myself.

All that aside, bird and winged – being imagery is strong in UFO accounts, and that includes Mothman accounts.

Image: Leda and the Swan, painting by artist from the School of Leonardo da Vinci, 1505-1510, public domain.

Visit my blog The Orange Orb
http://orangeorb.blogspot.com

An excellent article in the May issue of Vanity Fair: Bohemian Tragedy by Alex Shoumatoff. Shoumatoff snuck into the Grove to investigate the harvesting of Redwoods. There isn’t that much money to be made in doing this, but there is great harm, so why continue? As Shoumatoff and others ask, why not charge membership fees and the like? Instead, arrogance combined with cold disregard rule. A man and ex-member named “Jock” has worked hard to get the Grove to see reason, yet nothing of the kind has happened. The money made from the harvesting of trees was used to “manage” the forest but the reality is very different:

But, according to Jock, the forest outside the main grove was in terrible shape. Hiking trails had been turned into logging roads, footbridges had been bulldozed and not repaired, and there was massive erosion in some places, some of it washing down into the Russian River, which once hosted the most abundant spawning runs of coho and king salmon and steelhead in California.

The Grove’s arrogance, power and disregard has affected not just themselves in their inner circle, but the outside world as well; the peasants, us, the no accounts, yes, the measly proletariats. The issue of salmon is a huge one; affecting far more than the meal on our dinner plates; it affects the envirnoment as well as economy in many ways. The Grove calls all this harvesting “forest management” but there’s far more to this than simple “fire preventation” tactics, as Shoumatoff adeptly reveals.

Bohemian Grove has long been a subject full of all the things an esoteric junkie loves: conspiracies, the occult, rituals, the power elite in costume by firelight, all the time taking themselves very seriously, even while seemingly winking and nodding towards the amusing nature of good old traditional fun . . . and there is a steady undercurrent in this mainstream presentation of this article. The arrogance and rape of nature underscores the darker conspiracy driven theories about the Bohemian Grove. After all, it’s the ruling class indeed, the elite, the powerful, the global-industrial-military-entertainment complex reveling in their power, hidden from the rest of us, that control things.

Strange too are the juxtapositions of culture icons within the Grove; ex-members of The Grateful Dead are members of the Grove, as well as Fortean ironies, like the name Bohemian itself, for there is nothing “bohemian” about the Grove at all. As Shoumatoff writes:

In the Bohemian Club, “bohemian” means something completely different from the free-living, poverty-stricken artist that the word usually conjures. It means toeing the party line, United We Stand. Unbohemian means being disloyal, betraying the pact, the global-dominance group. It’s the worst thing a member can be called.

Thug tactics at work; Shoumatoff is rudely, and no doubt illegally, treated, but who’s to care? And the audit that suddenly befalls one of the Redwood’s protectors also teeters on the illegal. But again, who’s to care, and who’s going to change it?

This isn’t about saving a few pretty trees, but about protecting ancient Redwoods that, if left alone, help the environment and help protect us from global warming, er, “climate changes.” This refusal by the rulers of Grove is both disturbing and puzzling; as mentioned, why not charge more from members, if money is the issue? Is the continued and stubborn desecration of the Redwoods a sacrifice to maintain power? It seems so.

Image source: State Symbols USA