Debunking Patterson-Gimlin

A new documentary by Marq Evans looking into the famous Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film has finally uncovered real evidence that the film was faked. For years, researchers have speculated that the film was probably a hoax just based on probability. The argument goes something like this: if Bigfoot is a real animal running around in the California woods, somebody would have eventually gotten some footage better than Patterson-Gimlin, but no one ever has.

Now that's not exactly evidence, but it speaks more to a clever fake than a random wilderness encounter. Gimlin was interviewed years ago and confirmed that Patterson had basically led him to the site and told him to start filming as soon as they saw the creature, so it could have been set up without his knowledge. He added that for years he had been convinced the creature was real, but admitted in his old age that he was no longer entirely sure.

Bigfoot believers point out that the Patterson-Gimlin stands up to close analysis. You can magnify it and see what look like muscles moving under the skin. The proportions are all wrong for a human in a suit, with the ratio of arm length to height falling between that of the largest humans and apes. Special effects experts reviewed it when it first came out and concluded that it would have been incredibly expensive to fake if not impossible. The stabilized version of it that was created with digital technology still looks amazing and totally believable.

In the early 2000's a Discovery Channel program tried to make their own fake Bigfoot film using the current special effects of the time. It looked terrible. The Bigfoot was too skinny and the arms were too short. Even though the fur and so forth was well done, the final version still looked way faker than the Patterson-Gimlin. They had found a big person to put in the suit, but clearly said person was not big enough. The shorter arms also fell firmly into guy-in-a-gorilla-suit territory. Believers seized on the failure of this recreation as evidence that the original film was real.

New Mothman Documentary

The Mothman of Point Pleasant, West Virginia is one of the most famous cryptids in the United States. The creature was originally sighted around the time of the Silver Bridge collapse in 1967. The whole area around western West Virginia and eastern Kentucky has a whole lot of weird activity to this day, as touched on in the Hellier documentary series that I reviewed last month and many other places in the paranormal literature. A new documentary called The Mothman Legacy promises to recount more sightings and shed some light on the events surrounding the mysterious creature.

Per press release, "The final chapter in [Seth] Breedlove's Mothman trilogy, The Mothman Legacy will tell the story of dozens of sightings of a folk legend of dubious origin, who allegedly continues to be seen throughout the area today. With a dozen eyewitness interviews, the film promises to offer some of the most intense and terrifying encounters ever recorded.

"Many believe the Mothman to be a 1960's phenomenon, an omen only appearing before tragedy, and disappearing after a flap of sightings and the subsequent Silver Bridge collapse in 1967. But what if there's more? What if the origins of this omen trace back much further and go much deeper than anyone realized? And what if...the sightings never ended?

"The Mothman Legacy is directed by Seth Breedlove and produced by Adrienne Breedlove. Lyle Blackburn returns to narrate with cinematography by Zac Palmisano and an original score by Brandon Dalo. The Mothman Legacy is being funded through a crowdfunding campaign via Kickstarter which launches Thursday, February 6th. Rewards include copies of the film on DVD and Blu-Ray, posters, t-shirts, and more."

This sounds fascinating, and I probably should watch the other two documentaries in the series to get up to speed before I check this one out. They are Eyes of the Mothman from 2011 and The Mothman of Point Pleasant from 2017. There have been a few non-paranormal explanations floated for the Mothman, such as sightings of large owls. But while those may explain some of the eyewitness reports, it doesn't really address all the other strangeness that surrounds the Mothman legend. Maybe this documentary will.

Haunted Elsa Doll

This story is more silly than spooky or even obviously paranormal, but what the heck. The British tabloid Mirror has an article up about an alleged haunted Elsa doll from the Disney film Frozen. Basically, the story goes that the family tried to throw it away multiple times, but it CAME BACK! That's some scary stuff, kids!

A mum from Houston has taken to social media to reveal why she believes her daughter, Aurelia, has a "haunted" Elsa doll. In a viral post on Facebook , that has now been deleted, Emily Madonia explained that Aurelia's toy had first started to freak them out when it began singing and talking in Spanish, while switched off.

Right, the electronics developed a glitch. And? This happens fairly often with cheap electronics.

She and her husband Mat decided to throw the doll out (with their daughter's blessing) but since then it has found it's way back into their home, not once but twice. Emily wrote: "Mat threw it away weeks ago and then we found it inside on a wooden bench.

"Okay…so we were weirded out and tightly wrapped it in its own garbage bag and put that garbage bag INSIDE another garbage bag filled with other garbage and put it in the bottom of our garbage can underneath a bunch of other bags of garbage and wheeled it to the curb and it was collected on garbage day."

The family then went on holiday, thinking the whole thing was behind them, but when they returned home, the doll was back. "We were out of town, forgot about it. Today Aurelia says, 'Mom I saw the Elsa doll again in the backyard'," she continued.

The simplest explanation - the kid likes the doll but doesn't want to stand up to the parents. So instead of arguing, she makes a show of going along with throwing the doll away and then brings it back inside. I have kids. I know how this kind of thing goes. It's even possible that the Facebook post about this was removed because she finally fessed up.

But we'll never know, right? Maybe the ghost haunting the doll logged onto Facebook and took the post down. Sure, that's possible - you know, if this happened to be a ghost with some computer skills...

Nicholas Cage and the Holy Grail

If you ever watched the movie National Treasure and found Nicholas Cage so believable as a historical treasure hunter that you thought he might have done it in real life, it turns out you were right. According to this article from Salon, the actor explained in an interview that he did in fact run around the world at one point hunting for the Holy Grail. And apparently, there wasn't even a single coconut involved.

“That was the time when I almost went on — you might call it a grail quest,” Cage said. “I started following mythology, and I was finding properties that aligned with that. It was almost like ‘National Treasure.’ Of course, that didn’t sustain.”

Cage continued by saying he became obsessed with figuring out the Holy Grail’s location. Asked by Marchese to clarify his “quest,” Cage explained, “You read a book, and in it there’s a reference to another book, and then you buy that book, and then you attach the references. For me it was all about where was the grail? Was it here? Was it there? Is it at Glastonbury? Does it exist?”

The research led Cage to the Chalice Well in Glastonbury, where “legend had it that in that place was a grail chalice, or two cruets rather, one of blood and one of sweat.” Cage said the water tasted like blood, just as the story of Joseph of Arimathea says. Legend has it that Joseph hid the Holy Grail in the Chalice Well and thus the water would taste of Christ’s blood. Cage added, “I guess it’s really because there’s a lot of iron in the water.”

Cage’s trip to Glastonbury sparked buzz that his quest for the Holy Grail would have to go to Rhode Island, where the actor ended up buying property. “I don’t know if I’m going to say that’s why I bought the Rhode Island property. But I will say that is why I went to Rhode Island, and I happened to find the place beautiful,” he said. “But yes, this had put me on a search around different areas, mostly in England, but also some places in the States. What I ultimately found is: What is the Grail but Earth itself?”

So the Holy Grail is in Rhode Island? The Mormons must be thrilled. Yeah, I know he didn't actually say that in the interview, but he's a famous Hollywood actor with tons of money and the ability to travel pretty much anywhere, and Rhode Island is where he stopped looking. In true conspiracy-theory fashion, I'll ask the question - do you think that him stopping there was a coincidence? He also bought a piece of property. Is that where the Grail resides today?

More seriously, though, I do find it kind of interesting that the whole tale sounds just like a Hollywood film. Famous actor embarks on a quest to travel the world in search of the Grail, but at the end of the movie he concludes that really, the Grail is everywhere because it's the Earth itself. That's almost a script treatment right there.

Twice in Ten Days?

Talk-radio "prophet" Mark Taylor has really been hitting them out of the park this month, at least in the crackpot department. After telling his fans last week that something about racehorses meant that Barack Obama's execution was imminent (?), this week he's claiming that Democrats conjured Hurricane Michael as "retaliation" for Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation. If he keeps this up, he's going to get his own tag here on Augoeides just like Pat Robertson has. Do you think he's jealous or something?

Self-proclaimed Christian prophet Mark Taylor, who is the subject of a new movie produced by Liberty University, today declared that Hurricane Michael was created by Democrats as “absolute retaliation” for the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Last week Taylor revealed that liberals had created Hurricane Florence because the storm would “flood out the evidence” of voter fraud by Democrats. Taylor is a regular guest on Jim Bakker’s slop buckets show, where the audience shouts “amen” at his prophecies.

I suppose to a simpleton like Taylor the logic is obvious - if Pat Robertson conjures hurricane shields and is a Republican, Democrats must conjure hurricanes. Right? It also explains why the Trump administration has been unwilling to devote the necessary resources to rebuilding Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. Why should he clean up after his political enemies? And the tactic is effective, too - Hurricane Katrina is considered one of the key events that hurt the George W. Bush Administration.

See how that works? Take one part simplistic black-and-white thinking, one part historical revisionism, and about a billion parts batshit crazy and you have some idea of how Mark Taylor sees the world. The dude has made exactly one accurate prediction - and not only that, the same prediction made by basically everybody who owned a MAGA hat in 2015. He predicted that Donald Trump would be elected president. For some reason, this got a bunch of fundies to make a movie made about him. He's been wrong about everything ever since.

To be clear, I'm not saying that it's impossible for a skilled magician to conjure a hurricane. It's also true that some of those magicians are probably Democratic voters - I usually am, especially these days. But the idea that any political objective could be served by conjuring up a random hurricane to hit a random place on the map makes no statement at all. I expect that if a Democrat really was good enough to do it and wanted to make a political statement, they would blast Mar-a-Lago right into the Atlantic Ocean.

Trump Card Would Make a Better Movie

The Poor Oppressed Christians are at it again. In their quest to create their own little media world in which nothing non-Christian - and therefore impure - ever has to darken their poor, sensitive souls, Liberty University is planning to release a film called The Trump Prophecy. Of course, it will be released in October just ahead of the midterm election, because Liberty University is totally apolitical like that. The movie tries to make the case that all the Christians who love our distinctly-un-Christian president aren't actually terrible Christians at all for doing so - because Trump being president is part of God's plan.

In post-election interviews in 2016, voters often expressed a belief that God had some role in the dramatic, unexpected outcome. For the many people of faith who see God’s hand in their own lives — from their triumph over alcoholism to their luck in finding a parking spot — it’s not such a stretch to believe that God has a hand in determining who wins the Super Bowl or the White House. That may help explain why Taylor’s and Mary Colbert’s 2017 book, “The Trump Prophecies: The Astonishing True Story of the Man Who Saw Tomorrow . . . And What He Says Is Coming Next,” won a following.

Taylor in the book recounts his traumatic experiences as a firefighter, and how, suffering from anxiety and depression, he began to hear from both God and evil spirits. God told him in 2011, he wrote, that Trump would win the election, though he expected that to happen in 2012. Trump won in 2016 despite widespread belief among pollsters and voters alike that Hillary Clinton would beat him easily. He won in great part because of the support of more than 80 percent of white evangelical voters. Taylor gained attention and made more predictions.

Trump will win a second term, he said. God has also told him, he said, that the dollar will become the strongest currency in the world and that the news media will come to see that Trump is in the right. Producer Rick Eldridge and his Charlotte-based ReelWorks Studios heard Taylor’s story and imagined it as a compelling movie for Christians who feel secular filmmakers offer them too few choices. Over Thanksgiving, he met with Schultze, who was visiting family in Charlotte. The two talked about a collaboration with Liberty in which students would get weeks of hands-on experience doing such tasks as camera work, lighting and makeup.

I don't know that God was necessarily responsible for Clinton's decision to divert campaign resources from Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania in an effort to win North Carolina and Florida. That decision proved disastrous to the Clinton campaign, as Trump won all five, the former (neglected) three by very small margins. It's easy to imagine a scenario in which Clinton could have won by pouring resources into those three northern states in which Trump was campaigning very hard. That sounds more like a flat-out strategic blunder to me rather than anything divine.

Movie Review: To Dream of Falling Upwards

This is both a magick post and a movie review, for the film To Dream of Falling Upwards by Anterro Alli, author of Angel Tech and several other works on modern occultism. As I've mentioned previously, Hollywood movies tend to get magick hopelessly wrong. The usual practice is to replace the "science of the magi" with lots of flashing colored lights and garish CGI, with sigils flying all over the place and things exploding. Real magick doesn't work that way. It is less flashy, but deeper and far more profound than anything mainstream films usually address.

Here's some background before I get started with my review. Have you ever wondered why the world now has both New Falcon Press and Original Falcon Press, which look like they sell books from some of the same authors? That's a story unto itself - two weeks before the death of Christopher Hyatt, his estranged biological son somehow managed to get him to sign over the company. The folks who were previously running New Falcon along with Hyatt started up Original Falcon, and recounted their side of the preceding events here.

To be clear, I have no inside information regarding the veracity of these claims and am not trying to push one side or the other. I don't know if the legal issues are still ongoing or if they have been mostly resolved now, ten years later. If you really want to know, you'll have to read up on the situation and decide for yourself.

But the story as presented by Original Falcon is significant to my review because Alli loosely bases the setup for To Dream of Falling Upwards on it, replacing a publishing company with a Thelemic magical order. When the Chief Magus of the Temple of Horus dies, his estranged son takes over the order with plans to commercialize its teachings. Jack Mason, the Chief Magus' chosen successor, is thus cheated out of his rightful position and vows to take revenge. He performs a sex magick operation against the son and hires a Russian hit man to have him killed. The assassination succeeds, but Mason finds himself haunted by a demon that takes the form of the deceased son and must find a way to exorcise it.

Why Do They Do This?

The classic example of a limit to free speech is yelling "fire" in a crowded theater. After what happened recently at a theater in Redlands, California, constitutional lawyers might want to add proselytizing to that list as well. Preacher Michael Webber interrupted a screening of the new film Avengers: Infinity War when he stood up and started yelling about God and salvation. The moviegoers freaked out and stampeded to the exits, during which two of the fleeing patrons were injured.

Police were called, fearing a gunman in the theater because the preacher stood and shouted, “If you die tonight, would your passage to heaven be guaranteed?” The preacher’s shouting caused a panic inside of the packed movie theater which had people running for their lives, one witness described the scene: “That’s when the kind of chaos happened in the little exit, where people were jumping over the railings, and kind of falling over, twisting their ankles and hitting their head.”

Two people were seriously injured in the chaos created by the Christian terrorist. One woman was trampled after jumping over a railing and falling 20 feet attempting to get away from what she thought was a gunman about to open fire on the theatergoers. So far, Webber has been charged with a misdemeanor, and he claims that he has “preached” in theaters before without incident. He excuses his behavior by saying he “was unarmed.”

To be fair, I don't know that this rises to the level of "terrorism" because I never attribute to malice what can adequately explained by stupidity. But seeing as there have been mass shootings at movie screenings, it's pretty damn stupid. What did this guy expect would happen? People weren't just going to sit there for some sort of impromptu spiritual revival. Of course they were going to make a run for exits en masse. He's actually pretty lucky that only two people were hurt and nobody was killed. Human stampedes like this can all too easily turn deadly, and it would have been entirely his fault.

I realize that Christians are supposed to "spread the good news," but I sure don't think that this is what it looks like. If Christians feel oppressed by the general culture, it's often because they get pushback when they refuse to leave people with beliefs that differ from theirs alone. Nobody who belongs to a minority religion cares that you're Christian. We don't even care if you're what we consider a flat-out crazy Christian - as long as you don't try to convert us or work to impose laws that limit our rights to believe and practice as we see fit.

The Iraqi Stargate

Here's a weird theory that's been floating around the Internet for about fifteen years now. Apparently, the gods of the ancient Sumerians were space aliens and they provided their worshippers with stargates. You know, those big round gizmos from the 1994 film and the television franchise that ran in three incarnations from 1997 to 2010. One of these stargates was discovered by Saddam Hussein when he ordered renovations to an ancient Sumerian palace, and the United States invaded to take control of the device in 2003.

Essentially, the Iraq War Stargate theory pushes and narrows this idea a little further. Saying one of the technologies that were gifted upon the Sumerians were stargates and their positioning was one of the major reasons for the years of strife in the Middle East. I reached out to Dr. Michael Salla, who wrote an in-depth article about the theory way back in 2003, to learn about it further.

Before we got into the nitty-gritty, I had to figure out if a stargate was just as cool as Hollywood made it out to be. "It's kind of like an instantaneous space-time means of travel where people are instantaneously teleported from one area to another," said Salla. Yup, super cool.

So, the stargate is apparently found near in the Nasiriyah, a city about 370 km south-east of Baghdad—in the ancient city of Ur—within that city is the great Ziggurat, a massive temple, which had a, you guessed it, stargate. Some theories also argue there is a stargate directly in the city of Baghdad, in one of the basements of Hussein's palaces— where he probably did some pretty freaky stuff with it.

While the locations and number of the stargates is in dispute, one thing the theorists do all agree on, is that the Iraq War wasn't the first time that a foreign power showed interest in it. In what sounds like a super sweet Indiana Jones fan-fic, the Nazis were fighting the British in during WWII over control of the Stargate.

New SubGenius Documentary in the Works

Inquiring minds have been asking the question for years - is the Church of the SubGenius a joke disguised as a religion, or a religion disguised as a joke? More importantly, might it be both? Dangerous Minds reports that the makers of a new documentary claim that for the first time, their film will tell the true story of how J. R. "Bob" Dobbs and the church came to be - that is, if they can raise enough money on Kickstarter to pay for post-production.

The Church of the SubGenius’ annus mirabilis, 1998, may have come and gone (or it may be yet to come, as some of the faithful believe), but it’s never been easier to hear the word of “Bob.” OSI 74 carries on the Church’s TV ministry. Evangelical radio programs such as Hour of Slack, Puzzling Evidence, and Ask Dr. Hal no longer splutter from our computer speakers in a pitiable dribble of RealAudio 1.0, but burst forth in full stereo at 64 Kbps, a mighty firehose of Slack. The classic SubGenius recruitment movie Arise!, which used to cost 20 whole dollars, is now just as free as an ISKCON book with Ganesha on the cover. And The Book of the SubGenius is still in print.

But a documentary in the works promises to do something new for the Church, namely, to situate its founding and founders in real, actual historical time. Slacking Towards Bethlehem: J.R. “Bob” Dobbs and the Church of the SubGenius will tell the story of Rev. Ivan Stang and Dr. Philo Drummond meeting in mid-Seventies Texas as young weirdos. The pair “quickly forged a friendship over a shared love of comic books, Captain Beefheart and UFO paperbacks,” in the words of the movie’s press release, before starting a religion that won converts in R. Crumb, Robert Anton Wilson, DEVO, Frank Zappa and Negativland. Directing is Austin filmmaker Sandy K. Boone, whose late husband, David Boone, directed the 1980 cult film Invasion of the Aluminum People, which might be “an allegorical testimony for the Church of the SubGenius.”

The Church of the SubGenius was always dedicated to the virtue of Crass Consumerism, so it's no surprise to see a Kickstarter appeal to raise money for the film. And whatever else you want to say about the SubGenius movement, it has never failed to be deeply, deeply weird. The world could use more of that, especially these days. Which is to say, we all would appreciate a lot more slack. The article includes a link to the Kickstarter for the film, in case you would like to contribute and receive your very own bizarre backer reward.

I hope to see this get funded, because no matter what the truth is it sounds like it will be a lot of fun to watch. I'll be sure to update my readers here if and when it becomes available.

Practical Magic Was Cursed

Here's an interesting tidbit of Hollywood lore about the 1998 film Practical Magic. In a recent interview published by Vulture, director Griffin Dunne claimed that the film was cursed by a real witch. The film did poorly at the box office when it first came out and critics hated it, but it apparently has developed something of a cult following over the years. You know, just as if somebody threw a curse that waned over time. In the article, Dunne explains how it happened.

There’s something that I’ve never told anyone about before, it’s an interesting story and kind of scary too. I had a witch consultant on the movie. While I was developing it, I was never quite sure I had a real handle on the movie because, quite honestly, witches had no great interest to me. But I loved the book and I liked the setting and when I was working with this witch consultant, it occurred to me that I was making a movie about something I do know a lot about — strong women. I grew up in a house with a strong mother and my grandmother. These were formidable women. And my sister was no slouch.

So I had three generations of formidable women and when I got that into my head, I realized it’s not really about spells and spell books and all that — it’s about a legacy being passed from one generation to another. That helped me understand it, and that understanding came out of these conversations I had with this witch consultant. I thought she was a really intelligent person and I invited her to come to Los Angeles to observe the rehearsals with Sandy and Nicole. I had my producer make her a reservation at a nice hotel, and call her, and the witch goes, “You’re not going to buy me off with a hotel room. I want a percentage of the movie. I’m going to have my own Practical Magic cookbook.” She was paid quite well, and she says, “I want an additional $250,000 dollars.” The producer told her that’s just not possible. And she goes crazy and scares the shit out of the producer.

She says, “I’m going to put a curse on you. I’m putting a curse on this movie, and I’m putting a curse on Griffin.” So the producer comes back to my rehearsal, white as a ghost, and she tells me, “That call did not go well. She’s really really angry.” I had no idea quite what happened, so I get back to my office on the Warner Bros. lot and I listen to my voice-mail. [Drops voice to a growl.] “How dare you sic that shrew on me? You think you can buy me off, well let me tell you something? There is a land of curses!” And then she slips into tongues. It was terrifying. I listened to as much as I could and then I hung up. Within minutes, Warner’s been served with papers. She’s suing Warner Bros.

The movie flopped, Dunne never worked as a director again, and Warner Bros. would go on to settle the suit for an undisclosed sum. So there's really no way to say that the curse didn't work. The witch got everything she wanted. As for the cult status of the film, I've never seen so I have no idea if it's any good. But all curses wane over time, so if the film was good and its quality was at first being obscured by a curse - well, everything would work out pretty much as it has. I do find it bad form, though, to make threats if you're planning on cursing someone.

For one thing, threats render your results unscientific. If your target knows they're cursed they might change their behavior, and that means whatever happens won't necessarily be the result of paranormal action. So it makes your results hard to compare with those of other pure-probability spells that don't involve people. As I see it, a magician who threatens is doubting his or her ability to get the job done with magick alone. Magicians who are confident in their abilities simply curse, say nothing, and then sit back and observe the results.

In the interview, Dunne also mentions that in response to the curse he added the line to the film, “Curses only have power when you believe them.” That's a common New Age trope, but don't buy it for a second. It's true that a curse with no paranormal power, that works only by fear and suggestion rather than probability manipulation, won't work if you don't believe in it. But a real paranormal curse shifts probabilities around a target, so belief doesn't matter at all.

That's Not How Any Of This Works

"Evil for evil's sake" has to be just about the dumbest human motivation ever proposed. What's even dumber is when religious people insist that "obviously" this is what motivates anyone they disagree with. Like, say, people who make movies - you know, good movies as opposed to the wretched genre of "Christian film." According to Rodney Howard-Browne, a pastor who was involved with other evangelical leaders in a "laying on of hands" prayer ceremony for President Donald Trump, had this to say about - I guess - the entire Hollywood film industry.

“These people are full of the devil. These people can’t even be reasoned with,” Rodney Howard-Browne said in a sermon over the weekend. “They have already given their soul to the devil. Are you with me? These people go through seances, these people drink blood, these people sacrifice children.” In a clip posted online by Right Wing Watch, Howard-Browne added:

“They sacrifice children at the highest levels in Hollywood. They drink blood of young kids. This is a fact. That’s why the next thing to be exposed will be all the pedophilia that is going to come out of Hollywood and come out of Washington, D.C. The human sacrifice and the cannibalism has been going on for years.”

When someone told Howard-Browne that “they don’t do that,” he insisted that “it’s worse than what you think.” Howard-Browne then described the supposed satanic rituals that go on in Hollywood. “Many of the Hollywood actors that you go see on a screen, what you don’t know, they bring a witch, they do a big seance right there on the set and they worship devils and they allow devils to come into them before they take the part of what they’re going to act,” he said. “It’s a fact what I am telling you.”

Let's go down the list. In real occultism, "the devil" doesn't want to buy your soul so obviously you can't sell it. Some California New Agers do seances, so you probably could find a lot of people in the film industry who have at least attended one. But blood-drinking and human sacrifice? Sorry. Those are from horror movies, not real life. They also are pretty pointless for casting actual spells - you know, like the what most occultists really do.

New Documentary on Psychic Spies

Hopefully this new documentary is as good as the trailer makes it look. It covers Project Stargate, the remote viewing program that was operated by the CIA until 1995. The CIA recently declassified a bunch of information about the program, and the makers of this documentary have taken advantage of it to take a look inside what really went on there.

From everything I've studied over the years, Project Stargate did produce some successes. Some of the remote viewers they recruited and trained produced remarkably accurate information. The program was done in by several converging forces. First, the rise of satellite photography made some remote viewing entirely unnecessary. Second, the program became politically unpopular within the Clinton administration, which led to funding cuts. Finally, the CIA was never quite able to put together a protocol by which anyone could be trained as a successful remote viewer.

That last bit shouldn't have been surprising to anybody, but apparently it was. The idea that psychic ability is unlike any other human ability, in that all of us are precisely and equally psychic, is ridiculous. Obviously some people are more talented than others, and it should be recognized that getting accurate information is hard. That is, it requires a high level of natural talent in addition to training. The New Age movement has a lot invested in the "equally psychic" idea, and that's probably where the CIA got it from. Still, it's just wrong.

What you see in the records of Project Stargate is amble proof that ESP exists - that is, proof that at least some individuals can use psychic means to obtain accurate information at much higher rates than chance would predict. However, what you also see is that most of the best hits came from a handful of individuals. Most people can be trained to do remote viewing. Some of those people will get accurate information. And of the people who get accurate information, some of them will be able to do it a significant amount of the time. And the percentage of people who fall into that last group is a pretty small number.

But so what? I've mentioned before that I think the American obsession with creating studies that "prove ESP exists" is kind of silly. We should be investigating these phenomena to see what is happening in each case. For a lot of people, I'm pretty sure the answer is going to come out that they're usually making it up. Others are going to be flat-out frauds running scams. The point, though, is to identify those who are having legitimate experiences. Trying to convince a bunch of skeptics that "it's real" before you even get started on more important work is practically guaranteed to be a losing strategy.

Movie Review: A Dark Song

I rarely post movie reviews on here, since most Hollywood films about magick are hopelessly clueless when it comes to how it's supposed to work. Either it's this comic-book thing where wizards shoot beams of light all over the place, or something like Harry Potter where the magic is a bunch of fairy tale folklore mixed in with bits and pieces of real occult ideas and terminology. But A Dark Song, a new Irish horror film written and directed by Liam Gavin, at least puts some effort into trying to get it right. That alone is praiseworthy, hence this review.

The film stars Catherine Walker as Sophia Howard, a grieving woman who sets out to perform a fictional version of the Abramelin working. We'll get to that in a moment. It also stars Steve Oram as Joseph Solomon, an experienced magician Sophia hires to help her with the ritual procedure. Much of the film takes place just between the two of them, and both turn in excellent performances. The film manages to be creepy, suspenseful, and at a couple of points genuinely scary, and it accomplishes this without relying on a huge special effects budget or anything like that. The otherwise positive top review on IMDb complains about the low budget, but I have to say, I watch lots of films and I really don't see where spending a ton on effects would have made it much better.

The fact is that when you do real magick you don't see laser lights all over the place, or crackly energy like a plasma ball gone crazy. Magick is about doing the work, day in and day out, with all of that practice leading up to eventual success. The movie gets that completely right, showing the sustained effort and intent required to perform an operation that lasts for months. There's no "Hollywood magick" here, and I found the film better for it. There are a lot of misconceptions that beginning practitioners bring with them, and that sort of "shoot laser light" or "levitate feathers" nonsense is to blame for a lot of it.

So as a film, I enjoyed A Dark Song very much. As for the magick itself, I imagine that how I felt watching parts of the film must be how physicists feel when they watch movie scientists go on about how to solve whatever physics problem is driving the storyline. Much of the exposition is close to the real thing - much closer than in any film I have previously seen. It's refreshing to hear Joseph Solomon talking about how these are "real angels" and "real demons," and that those "people on the Internet" who say the Holy Guardian Angel is your "Higher Self" are just wrong. That's an actual conversation I see all the time. But many of the details of the ritual are misinterpreted, and some are just wrong.

Against "Beauty and the Beast"

This whole thing is all so predictable. Disney recently announced that its new live action revival of the film Beauty and the Beast will include a gay character, and both the Russian government and the Poor Oppressed Christians completely freaked. This is despite the fact that the freakiness of the Beauty and the Beast storyline goes way that of a character who is merely gay.

Beauty and the Beast creators have prompted uproar after it was revealed that the live-action remake would feature an exclusively gay moment for 'the first time in Disney history'. LeFou, the sidekick to antagonist Gaston, is set to come to terms with his sexual feelings for Belle's suitor throughout the course of the film, director Bill Condon revealed.

Since his announcement, Russian MPs and Christian-run cinemas in America have threatened to boycott the film because of its inclusion of a gay character. Christian owners of a cinema in rural Alabama said they would only show "family-orientated films" so its customers were "free to come watch wholesome movies without worrying about sex, nudity, homosexuality and foul language".

Meanwhile Russian culture minister Vladimir Medinsky is facing mounting pressure to assess whether the film violates the country's controversial 'gay propaganda' law which prohibits children from material "advocating for a denial of traditional family values". One thing that seems to have been overlooked by critics of the film's gay sub-plot, however, is the films main storyline that sees Belle, the protagonist, fall in love with a buffalo.

One of the absolute truths I have seen with respect to the Internet is this. If a news story gets posted about, say, a guy having sex with a dog, one of the earliest comments on that thread will be "was it a boy dog or a girl dog?" The implication is obvious. There are a whole lot of folks out there who are just fine with bestiality as long as it's not gay bestiality.

Which frankly, strikes me as totally bizarre. But I wonder if the deal is that the Poor Oppressed Christians have spent so much time and energy trying to portray the only real sins in the world as homosexuality and abortion, nobody remembers that bestiality is on that list too if you actually read the Bible - which, I realize, too few of the Poor Oppressed really do.

I won't be seeing the movie because I don't personally much care for Beauty and the Beast as a story, but it has nothing to do with a character being gay. As I see it, people should be able to be with any consenting adult they fall in love with. But I draw a line at buffalo.

Weirdness Versus "The Simulation"

Weirdness is everywhere. This past year has seen a couple of unusual events that were considered highly unlikely. Donald Trump was elected president, despite most the polls leading up the election showing him behind. The Super Bowl featured the biggest comeback win in the history of the game. And recently, the Oscars ceremony screwed up the award for Best Picture by handing the presenters the wrong envelope. The New Yorker has an article up that claims this weirdness supports the "simulation argument." That is, the scenario explored in the film The Matrix is true and we are all components in an elaborate computer simulation. I've complained a number of times in the past about how dumb this idea really is. And, I have no problem whatsoever doing it again.

And so both of these bizarre events put one in mind of a simple but arresting thesis: that we are living in the Matrix, and something has gone wrong with the controllers. This idea was, I’m told, put forward first and most forcibly by the N.Y.U. philosopher David Chalmers: what is happening lately, he says, is support for the hypothesis that we are living in a computer simulation and that something has recently gone haywire within it. The people or machines or aliens who are supposed to be running our lives are having some kind of breakdown. There’s a glitch, and we are in it.

Once this insight is offered, it must be said, everything else begins to fall in order. The recent Super Bowl, for instance. The result, bizarre on the surface—with that unprecedented and impossible comeback complete with razzle-dazzle catches and completely blown coverages and defensive breakdowns—makes no sense at all in the “real” world. Doesn’t happen. But it is exactly what you expect to happen when a teen-ager and his middle-aged father exchange controllers in the EA Sports video-game version: the father stabs and pushes the buttons desperately while the kid makes one play after another, and twenty-five-point leads are erased in minutes, and in just that way—with ridiculous ease on the one side and chicken-with-its-head-cut-off panic infecting the other. What happened, then, one realizes with last-five-minutes-of-“The Twilight Zone” logic, is obvious: sometime in the third quarter, the omniscient alien or supercomputer that was “playing” the Patriots exchanged his controller with his teen-age offspring, or newer model, with the unbelievable result we saw.

And actually, that's a great big nope. Who says the "real world" isn't weird? Certainly not magicians. We mess with this stuff all the time. It may even be that as more of us work out how to do more effective magick, the weirdness is going to multiply. There were a whole bunch of people who bragged about doing magick to get Trump elected. I've been asked a number of times how to do magick to influence sporting events, so there must be people out there doing it, probably on all sides. And is it really such a stretch that magicians might want to mess with the Oscars? I mean, I personally think the whole thing is silly, but there are apparently a lot of people out there who consider them incredibly important.

Monkey God City Still Cursed

Here's something that Indiana Jones never had to contend with. Following the legend of a cursed 16th century city in Honduras dubbed "the City of the Monkey God," explorers considered themselves especially fortunate when they worked out its location in 2015. But recently, when they arrived at the site, they discovered the totally mundane reason that the city was abandoned. The place turned out to be infested with a rare flesh-eating parasite that devours the faces of those it infects.

Legend has it that the locals fled Honduras’ City of the Monkey God in the 16th century fearing that it had been cursed with disease. Five-hundred years later, a group of explorers excavating the lost city became the latest victims to incur the wrath of the monkey god when they nearly lost their faces to a rare flesh-eating parasite.

“The parasite migrates to the mucous membranes of your mouth and your nose and basically eats them away,” Doug Preston, an author who documented the trip, said. “Your nose falls off, your lips fall off, and eventually your face becomes a gigantic, open sore.”

The group, made up of American and Honduran explorers and archeologists, announced they found the lost city, also known as the Ciudad Blanca or the White City, in 2015. The city earned its name, according to American explorer Theodore Morde, because of indigenous legends stating it contained a giant buried statue of a monkey god. Morde claimed to be the first to find the lost city after returning from an expedition, but died before he could return.

So yeah, that sounds like a pretty nasty curse to me. If people in my city started losing their faces, I would leave too. The takeaway, I suppose, is that many of these abandoned sites were abandoned for perfectly good reasons. Sometimes those reasons have to do with events that are long over, but sometimes they endure. Presumably, the city was built too close to where these parasites live, and the residents began to become infected at an accelerated rate before the mass exodus.

The article also notes that in order to reach the site, the explorers had to contend with Indiana Jones' most feared and hated foes, poisonous snakes. So at least that's one place where the movies tell it like it is.

Staring at Goats

This article is re-posted from my author website, from all the way back in 2010. The subject came up in the comments on my article from Sunday, so I thought today might be a good time to revisit it.

In Arcana the Central Intelligence Agency operates a top secret “Magick Office” that developed out of the remote viewing experiments that started in the 1970’s. Last weekend I saw the film The Men Who Stare At Goats which draws its inspiration from actual paranormal experiments conducted by the United States Army beginning in 1979. The film is based on a BBC documentary series called The Crazy Rulers of the World by Jon Ronson and his accompanying book from which the film takes its title.

This last week I tracked down a copy of The Crazy Rulers of the World and was surprised at how many events from the film appear in nearly the same form as they do in the documentary with only the characters fictionalized. As the opening quote of the film states, “More of this is true than you would believe.” Apparently this is indeed the case, and it makes the conspiracy theorist in me wonder if this is just the material that the government was willing to declassify what else might be going on. Could there really be a CIA or Army Magick Office?

One of the more interesting sections of the documentary, at least to a ritual magician like myself, was Ronson’s interview of Guy Savelli, the man who claimed to have stopped the heart of a goat through the psychic power of “remote influencing.” In the following transcribed section Savelli explains to Ronson how he did it:

“I picture a golden road going up in the sky, and I, because I’m Christian, I picture that the Lord is up there. And I picture myself walking up into the arms of the Lord and I picture His arms around me. And when He does it I get a chill inside of me and I know it’s right. So I did that, and I’m kind of asking for a way to knock this goat down.”

Savelli thus starts out with a godform assumption just like any ritual magician would. So far this sounds more like kind of a freeform spell than how psychic power is usually described by parapsychologists.

“So it comes to me that, probably, there’s this one picture that we have of Saint Michael the Archangel with his sword in the air like that. So I got that picture in my mind and I kind of sent it over with my mind to where the goat was. In my mind I pictured that Saint Michael got this sword and was going through the goat and knocking it down to the ground.”

So the resulting paranormal effect was accomplished by conjuring an Archangel! That’s magick, folks, and I’m willing to bet that if this really worked at all ceremonial forms would substantially improve its effectiveness. If I were an Army official who knew anything about Western esotericism and heard someone describe their powers to me in the way that Savelli does, the very next thing I would do is start rounding up funding for a Magick Office!

I suppose in the end you can never really can tell, since fiction does occasionally veer surprisingly close to the truth. But I’ll be as amazed as anyone if it comes out twenty years from now that sure enough, the Magick Office was for real.

Demonic Occult Deception

That's the phrase used by one Christian movie reviewer to describe the new Doctor Strange movie, now in theaters. I have yet to see the film myself, but I have heard from a number of friends who liked it. For anybody who doesn't know, Doctor Strange is the Marvel superhero whose powers stem his mastery of the magical arts - as they exist in the fictional Marvel universe. So of course this reviewer hated the film, because in it the wizard is the good guy.

Marvel's Doctor Strange will finally be released in U.S. theaters this weekend, and so far, it has been well-received by both fans and the critics, and doing well at the box office overseas (You can read our full review here), but as the saying goes, "you can't please everyone." One critic decided to label the film "abhorrent" and cites Biblical passages in his review to prove his points.

Dr. Ted Baehr, the chair of the Christian Film & Television Commission, has given Doctor Strange a painful -4 or "Abhorrent" rating. “[Doctor Strange is] a dangerous introduction to demonic occult deception,” Behr wrote in his review. “The Bible clearly warns against the kind of occult practices and sorcery the hero in this movie learns to do, in Deuteronomy 18:9-12 and Galatians 5:20. Also in the movie, the hero’s New Age, occult guru teaches there may be no afterlife, that death is truly the end, and that this is a good thing.”

One of the odd commonalities between fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist atheists is their shared hatred of imagination. Does anybody seriously think that comic book characters like Doctor Strange practice anything even remotely resembling real magick? He's a superhero; he's totally not real, and the comics in which he appears are works of fiction. Which is what we humans do to entertain ourselves - come up with imaginary situations that we know full well aren't real. Why watching a fictional movie would be dangerous to anyone is entirely beyond me.

Inside a Cult

Filmmaker Will Allen recently released a documentary entitled Holy Hell about his experiences inside a cult. A lot of the time, the word "cult" gets thrown around in such a way that it could refer to any new religious movement, but as Allen tells it, in this case the moniker fits. Allen was a member of a group called Buddhafield (which, as far as I can tell, did not in fact practice Buddhism) for more than twenty years. In the documentary he alleges that the group's leader, a man named Michel Rostand, was a classic manipulative cult leader who abused his followers.

His insider document of two decades of life inside the cult, entitled Holy Hell, combines home movies and official footage from these years alongside new interviews with former members detailing the sadistic, predatory nature that lay behind their leader's ostensibly gentle, omnipotent façade. Buddhafield's service-oriented, off-the-grid approach to attaining peace and harmony — "It was our little utopia in the middle of this big giant city," says one former member in the film — disguised its leader's iniquities, ranging from total mind control and forced abortions to alleged widespread sexual abuse and rape. The carrot dangled to all adherents was "The Knowing," a ritual in which Rostand would "transfer his energy" to the participant so they would truly know God.

I should probably point out here that nobody can do spiritual practice for you. Priests can't do it, gurus can't do it, even Jesus can't do it. It is useful to find a teacher who can show you how to practice, but after that you're on your own. The ironic thing here is that if some of these students expended the time and effort that they spent fitting into the group on their own personal practice, they probably would be a lot further along the spiritual path at this point.

Incidentally, that's why my Enochian books are written the way that they are. Instead of filling them with a bunch of personal "received material" or deep symbolic analysis, what they teach you is precisely how to get in touch with the Enochian entities and work with them. I don't necessarily know what you'll get when you do the work, but realizations stemming from your own work will always be more significant for your spiritual development than the realizations of others.