LogDriver

The poppies bobbing on the tide . . .

The desert wind calling . . .

http://ufotrail.blogspot.com/2014/04/what-happened-to-ambient-monitoring.html

In case you missed it, someone actually did try to do some research on what was going on during those alien abduction experiences people started talking about so much in the 1990s.  The ‘someone’ in question was MUFON, one of the main UFO organizations in the US.  MUFON seems like a logical group to try to see if any kind of visual or physical evidence could be collected to corroborate stories about aliens coming into people’s bedrooms to whisk them off into space to be probed and prodded in various ways.  The name of the study was the Ambient Monitoring Project (AMP).  UFO blogger and my Twitter homie Jack Brewer has written extensively about it at the link above.

Apparently data collection was completed for the AMP, but no results ever came out of the study and thus we have no new insights into the alien abduction experience.  Brewer’s investigative reporting does, however, offer some amazing insights into how non-profits and science work inside the UFO Nebula.  When I was in grad school, I spent years working in many different roles in non-profit and academic environments.  People’s lives and careers revolved grant proposals, progress reports, conference papers, peer review, human subjects protocols and credible research design. Not surprisingly, none of those terrestrial concerns seem to apply to non-profits like MUFON doing research in the Ufosphere.  Read Brewer’s post for the astounding details.  I promise you will be shocked, even if you know nothing and care not about UFOs.

My point is that it’s quite interesting, given how much the rhetoric and regalia of science means to the UFO field, that the field is remarkably inept at actually doing science.  Many of the top people in the field have some sort of technical background, advanced degrees or even scientific training (although only in the ‘hard’ sciences).  The kinds of research problems Brewer uncovered in his investigation are almost unbelievable coming from people with backgrounds beyond the sophomore year in college.

I don’t believe the individuals involved in the AMP are either ignorant or stupid.  As someone with an interest in the sociology of science, I tend to think that social forces combined with a particularly intransigent scientific question are responsible for the remarkably poor research practice exemplified by the AMP.  To me, the interesting question is how social forces shape what people think they can know and do.  I doubt I will ever know what all those UFOs are about or even see one myself, but I can at least try to figure out how people think about such things.

Besides, being a failed academic, I have certain sympathy for fruitless research projects.  The AMP is practically family to me.

Grump #1: Sex and Gender

1.  Women who say women only use sex as a bargaining chip need to understand that not every woman has low libido.  They may also need to learn how to masturbate.

2.  Men who say that women don't like sex need to understand that women might not like sex with them, personally.  They may also need to learn some different techniques.

So much for gripes based on what male and female friends like to complain about.  I always prescribe Dan Savage. But wait, there's more!

Grump #2:  The Death Knell That Is Your Meaningful Synchronicity Story

The Crystal Cave

I suffer from rare but inevitable bouts of nostalgia wherein I grasp backwards through time so far that I fall clear off the internet.  For instance, it is impossible to find a photo of the crystal cavern display that used to be one of my favorites at the (old) New York State Museum.

I grew up in a small town outside the state capital of Albany and was from an early age hauled out on school trips to be edified and cultured up by visiting the New York State Museum.  As a kindergartner, the most interesting thing in the museum was what the black light in the otherwise darkened coat room did to our shoelaces and teeth.  In third grade, along with everyone else I made it a point to surreptitiously lick the giant pillar of rock salt in the Hall of Rocks and Minerals just like our teachers told us all we should absolutely not do because even though the rock really was salt, licking it was dirty and disgusting.  Note to posterity: the teachers are right, it totally DOES taste just like salt.

In sixth grade, the budding scientist in me was quite taken by a display of fluorescing minerals as shown in a display alternating daylight and then black light (apparently I had a thing for black lights).  By the time I was a preteen, I was making a beeline for the Crystal Cave any time I got within range of the Hall of Rocks and Minerals.  It was strange, it was beautiful, it was limitless, it was mysterious, and it was where Merlin had dreamed his dreams in Mary Stewart's recently published Arthurian cycle novel The Crystal Cave.

Technically, the display was called The Calcite Cave.  It was an ambitious and at the time sophisticated reproduction of a tremendous crystal find made in 1906 during quarrying operations in remote northern New York State.  Investigating a small opening that appeared some 20 feet up in a quarry wall, geologists discovered a crystal-lined cavity roughly 10 feet wide and 5 feet high that ran back 20 feet before turning, narrowing and finally becoming impassible.

The amethystine calcite crystals lining the cave were "of extraordinary size, perfection and beauty."  From the 1918 Annual Report of the New York State Museum:

"The crystals lined the cavern completely, attached at the sides but on the bottom lying free, and their size was most impressive. Some were immense, probably among the largest ever found, while the greater part of the  exposed surface of the cave bore superb crystals, deeply colored of an amethystine violet, and the interstices were filled with clusters of smaller but perfect crystallizations."

12 to 14 tons of crystals were removed from the cave before quarrying continued, of which ten tons were used in reproducing the cavern for the "new" (established 1912) New York State Museum.

Lewis County, my birthplace and also the area where the Calcite Cave was found, was a land of mineralogical discovery and wealth from the mid 1800s to the early 1900s. Although you'd never know it to look at Lewis County today, it was a bit of an economic and scientific powerhouse in its heyday.  The New York State Museum, located further south at the center of political power in Albany had, in fact, as its focus mineralogical and natural history.  Thus, a great deal of effort and technical acumen went into preserving this "brilliant grotto," this "extraordinary aggregation" of crystals as a display for the State Museum:

"The door and brick work were torn away from the side of a small room that opened into the museum.  In this room was constructed a strong steel framework about the same shape, and one half the size, of the original cavern. The top of this steel cage was securely fastened to a iron girder by a truss rod and turnbuckle in order to lessen the strain on the floor. Ten decimeters up from the bottom of the framework a solid flooring was laid, and upon this the larger crystals were set, in a mixture of plaster of Paris and excelsior, space being provided behind each large crystal for an electric light … Smaller crystals were then attached to the sides and top … Great care was necessary in fitting the various crystals together and it was three months before this part of the work was completed. Two mirrors, cleverly concealed in opposite corners, give the effect of the smaller, more contracted portion of the cavern."

(From http://www.minsocam.org/ammin/AM5/AM5_3.pdf)

One of the architects of this effort, Noah T. Clarke, explained the manner of the illusion as follows:

"... careful detailed study of the project had to be assumed and worked out by those skilled in many arts.  A blind closet about 8 feet square beneath an arch in the mineral hall seemed a likely place for such an exhibit but the difficulty in this was to obtain in such a small space the depth required by the original cave. After much experiment it was found that by placing upright a plate glass mirror … we could produce an apparent depth of 25 feet and a gradual slope down to a narrow passage, as in the original. With this arrangement the spectator could not see his own image or the ordinary visitor detect a mirror."

(New York State Legislative Documents, Vol. 31 (1920) pp 223-224 via Google)

As a child, the Crystal Cave was just a smallish (2' x 2') window (with a step stool in front for those requiring such accommodation) into a blazing, limitless wonderland of color and light.  I always wanted to crawl right into the cave and sleep, like the young Merlin, on its beautiful, sharp stones; I was always stopped by the pane of glass between us.  That was my first notion of injustice.  How could they let me see such beauty but then not permit me to explore it fully?  And so I became a caver, but that's just a side passage.

Let's take a look at the building where they had to knock out a wall and build special trusses to hold the ten tons of crystals making up the Calcite Cave; ladies and gentlemen, I present to you 

The Albany Education Building

Although it's the state capital, Albany is not a very big town.  The Education Building, the A.E. Smith Building, the State Capitol Building and the South Mall complex ring one small park.  They are historical, monumental buildings but  when I was growing up, they were my playground, my school and later my workplace.

These buildings are literally my dream architecture.  I left New York State a long time ago and have never tried very hard to look back at my time there, but like I say, I have these intermittent bouts of nostalgia that lead me to find certain images on the web that I realize are to this day the floor plan and architecture of my dreams . . .

Albany's State Education Building, as it is known, was completed in 1912.   Albany Times-Union journalist Casey Seiler explains the building's original purpose:

" ... as a showplace for a bureaucracy that had only recently undergone major change. After years of reform efforts, the Unification Act of 1904 merged leadership of New York's elementary education and the upper levels — including high school as well as colleges, universities and academies — under the Board of Regents, creating the modern State Education Department."

(http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Majesty-of-education-3946430.php#photo-3589190)  10/15/2012

I'll only steal one photo from the article, the one of the stairs.  I used to run up and down these every day when I worked as a temporary file clerk in the empty library stacks on the third floor in the 1980s.  I could have taken the elevator, but with stairs like these, are you kidding?

This is actually a really bad picture of the stairs.  It's not even a good picture of my memory of the stairs.  However, you have to understand that that kind of monumental architecture is more easily experienced than photographed.  Frankly, I'm thrilled to see any picture of the stairs at all.

Journalist Seiler quotes an area resident who visited the museum in grade school:

""It used to be a class trip every year," said Parslow, who now works on the fifth floor — just steps from the former site of the log home — as an education program assistant."  See?! I was right!  They brought us every year.  

Seiler goes on to say, "Walking through State Ed, it's easy those who work in more modern office buildings to feel a little jealous of those who get to spend their workday around such grand spaces."

January 19

Last night I had a bunch of dreams but one got pretty strange.  I was skimming along through the air by touching the edges of buildings with my feet.  This seemed to me to be a perfectly natural way to travel, and I was even enjoying it.  However, at one point I started to drift away from the buildings I needed to push off from and lost control over where I was going.  In short order I was just floating midair above the street.  Somehow I managed to turn around and there was this guy.  He was laughing at me and said he had roped me from the other side of the street where he lived and pulled me in.  There were no words.  He seemed to think the whole thing was pretty funny.

We went back to his place together.  He lived on top of the roofs on the other side of the street.  A couple young guys were there with him.  The old man was a teacher and I suddenly remembered I had met him in a dream the night before.  We already had a relationship going, I had just forgotten.

We all sat down together and the old man started to do this exercise with one of the men.  Then he had me do the same exercise with the other guy.  It involved looking at a picture and a book and saying a word.  I got the word wrong and complained that the exercise didn’t make any sense.  It was too hard for me.

The old man had to go somewhere with the boys.  I could stay with his wife until he returned.  Then he would give me some special tutoring so I could catch up.  In the meantime I could watch a movie or something.

When I woke up from this dream I remembered it and I also remembered that I had in fact dreamed about the same old man the night before, as well.  I thought this was some kind of crazy shit, because I hadn’t even started taking herbs yet and here I am having a teaching dream.  Where did this guy come from?

(I had just done an intake with a herbalist who was formulating some medicine to send me.)

As I slowly came awake I suddenly had the impression of a prickly pear pad and the word “opuntia” popped into my head.  I got up and made coffee and fed the cats.

Here’s my theory.  This is the third time, and now I have a theory.  I think that all of the plants who have talked to me are the same guy.  I think this old man was opuntia and the cholla who tried to warn me when I was in Arizona was opuntia (chollas are opuntias) and the cacti that talked to me that time a long time ago were opuntias.  I think I’ve got a friend in the prickly pear business.

Furthermore, I think whatever the herbalist did to prepare her formula for me either alerted my barbed friend to my plight or directly requested his assistance and he came to me in a dream.  That be some crazy kind of shit, but there it is.

As a result of the dream, I’ve been walking around all day in a sort of logico-rational haze.  If it is true that a plant spirit is talking to me, what does that mean about the world that I live in?  I’m familiar with many accounts of spirit learning and shamanship in which people talk effortlessly with all kinds of beings and are constantly unraveling obscure symbolic quizzes to reveal profound insights.  To say the least, this has not been my experience.  I waver between confusion and delusion and then usually act flailingly out of fear or ignorance.  There’s nothing wise, skilled or graceful about my perceptions of the spiritual world.  What does it mean to think that it’s even more real than I already feel it to be?

In the end, supernatural talking opuntias versus so-called reality: what’s the diff?  I seem to be really bad at both of them.  For that reason, I can’t really rule out talking cacti.  And one thing I’ll say for talking cacti: they’re very respectable.  There’s no question about it.  With people, you know you should feel respect for them, Buddha nature and yada yada yada, but sometimes it’s pretty hard.  With talking cacti, you feel it right away.  Dude is really big, really ancient, really powerful, plus he seems to be a nice guy and has a sense of humor.  So what if he’s wearing a cardigan?  Dude like that can wear whatever he wants.

I'm working on an article about anatta (no-self) and came across my one of my favorite Buddhist stories ever, from a talk by Rev. Master Jisho Perry:

You’re choosing all the time to make -- to put your mind in a certain place.  You can also chose to just let the mind be like the dog chasing the stick.  Just wandering, for ever and ever.  Most of the time when the dog’s chasing the stick we’re not aware that the dog is chasing the stick.  We’re just thinking that the stick is really wonderful.  It’s wonderful that [some] monk had the image of that and said, “The lion doesn't look at the stick.  The lion looks at who threw the stick.”

If you choose to look at the source of those thoughts -- that is, the act of mindfulness -- that’s being the lion.

Karma is purified or cleansed when you make a volitional action to not react to old karma.  It is converted at the moment when you turn to look at who’s throwing the stick.

Listen to or download the whole talk "On Cleansing Karma" here:

The wave of newspaper stories about mystery airships that spread across the United States in the 1890s (and are still a staple of UFO lore) is thought to have begun in California (Clark, 2012).  As it happens, around the same time a certain Professor Botts, who split his time between Paso Robles in Southern California and the San Francisco Bay region in the north, was tinkering around and designing a fleet of air ships that would carry a scientific team to the North Pole.  He chose Richmond, California* as the place to make his dream a reality.

Barnet Botts was born in Indiana in 1857.  He and his siblings were orphaned early on and moved to Paso Robles in California to live with an uncle.  Botts seems to have been an inventive type and is credited with coming up with an early telephone and a specialized plow.  He was a whittler all his life and had an extensive collection of wooden airplanes.  He lived, worked and raised a family in Paso Robles, where in 1894 he published a paper entitled Botts’ Air Ship: The Problem of Aerial Navigation.

Since I’m stealing this story practically wholesale from Susan D. Cole’s Richmond – Windows to the Past (1980), I will let her excellent prose, lightly condensed, speak for itself:

“In the winter of 1900, a man identifying himself as Professor Robert H. Botts came to Point Richmond and quietly began to set up a workshop on Nicholl Nob.  Six months later he announced that he was going to build a flying machine.  He obtained at least two patents on “a very light and simple form of steam engine designed to be used on an airship of which he is the inventor” and on a “steam boiler . . . especially developed for air ships and locomobiles.

“Professor Botts built a model of his air ship which was displayed in Richmond and San Francisco.  In February of 1902, he announced that he was going to build two airships by summer and that he was organizing a scientific expedition to the North Pole.  Each air ship was to carry four persons and their scientific equipment.  They would set up camp at Prince Edward Island and spend several weeks at the Pole.  Their equipment would include motion picture cameras and the Marconi system for wireless telegraphy.  He proposed they return via Greenland, New York and St. Louis, reaching the latter in time to show the moving picture at the 1903 World’s Fair.”

I don’t know about you, but when I read “expedition to the North Pole” in the context of an as-yet-uninvented flying machine, my thoughts immediately drift to late-night talk show host Art Bell’s interviews with delightful nut jobs like Harley Byrd and Dallas Thompson.  It’s quite true that in the early 1900s Richmond and its neighboring city El Cerrito did actually have an airplane industry of sorts (see http://www.elcerritohistoricalsociety.org/elcerritoairport.html, for example).  Nevertheless, something seems strange in this account.

Barnet, now Professor Robert, Botts had reinvented himself on one of his trips north from Paso Robles to the San Francisco Bay.  He hasn’t flown one ship successfully but is now proposing that two will travel to the North Pole via, for some reason, Prince Edward Island (which, then as now, is off the eastern coast of Canada).  However, the expedition will be using all the latest in technology and will have a marketable product in time for the upcoming World’s Fair.  Clearly Professor Botts had somewhere along the line run into a promoter (what today we would call a ‘marketing executive’) who helped shape his dream.  I’ll let Ms. Cole continue:

“In March 1902 Botts and his promoters began selling shares in the World’s Aerial Navigation and Construction Company of Richmond.  The price rapidly rose from one cent a share to five cents a share.  Eventually, enough money was raised to build a proper hangar/workshop and work began on the air ship.  On May 26, 1902 Botts gave a practical demonstration of the engine using compressed air from the Santa Fe yards.  Next he began the boiler, and in August of that year displayed the engine, boiler and model of the air ship at Richmond’s Fiesta and Carnival.  On the day of the trial flight, the flying machine was taken to the top of Nicholl Nob, a gust of wind hit the light craft and it was caught up and smashed on the steep slopes of the hill.  Botts left town, his dreams literally shattered.  The townspeople never heard from him again.”

I’m impressed by the production timeline here.  Botts publishes a paper in 1894 while living in Paso Robles.  In 1900 he sets up shop in what today we call Point Richmond and six months later announces he will build a flying machine.  He gets patents, builds and displays a model of his idea.  Suddenly in 1902 the plan is to build two ships and host a scientific expedition to the North Pole.  Shares in the company go on sale in March.  The engine is demonstrated in May and in August more parts are put on parade in the local city festival.  The actual test flight is a failure and Botts disappears.

I get the impression that Botts was a naïve inventor who was strung along by promoters who used his his air ship dreams to manipulate him.  Were they trying to capitalize on the mystery air ship craze?  It seems unlikely Botts was in on the scheme.  Cole writes:

“After his keen disappointment in Richmond, Botts returned to Paso Robles.  He settled into a more mundane way of life.  He would go off in the morning with a hunk of cheese and bread to cut wood in the countryside.  His eyesight began to fail.  He died August 28, 1918.  Whether his air ship would have flown were it not for the unfortunate accident has never been demonstrated, but similar air ships were never very successful.”

The failure of the Bottmobile (if I may) was not, of course, an accident.  The area of today’s Miller-Knox Regional Shoreline Park that Botts flew his craft from is steep and catches stiff breezes off the waters of the San Francisco and San Pablo Bays.  In all likelihood, Botts was rushed into production by people who used the promise of his dreams coming true to make them rich.

Plus ca change and all that. 

* Actually, Richmond, California was not incorporated until 1905.  Prior to that time, the tiny town of Point Richmond that is still perched at the juncture of San Francisco and San Pablo Bays essentially was all there was to Richmond, California.

Bibliography

Clark, J. (2012). Unexplained!: Strange Sightings, Incredible Occurrences, and Puzzling Physical Phenomena (Third Edition, Third edition edition.). Detroit, MI: Visible Ink Press.

Cole, S. (1980). Richmond - Windows to the Past. Richmond, CA: Wildcat Canyon Books.

"GRANDE VISTA, THE BELGUM SANATORIUM, Inc.  Richmond.  For nervous, mental, drug and alcoholic psychoses.  Equipped for electro-hydro and psycho-therapy.  Address H. N. Belgum, M. D., Medical Director."

     --  from California Medicine, Vol. 13 (January, 1915)

"For the last several years Dr. Belgum has run a sanitarium on the old Mintzer home place in the hills beyond Grand Canyon Park."

     --  from Evan Griffins' 1938 recollections of early Richmond, California history posted by the El Cerrito Historical Society here.

The 'old Mintzer place' was an elegant home associated with local land baron Jacob Tewksbury and his daughter, Jennie, on the occasion of her marriage to a Dr. Mintzer.

"Guests entered through a high-ceilinged foyer decorated with Tiffany chandeliers. Other features included a day room, library, kitchen, living room, and formal dining room. A curving staircase led to bedrooms and offices — nearly all with magnificent views — on a second floor."

     -- from Frisco Vista's excellent Belgum post here.

The house was built high in the hills above a sparsely inhabited expanse of marshy plain punctuated by the tiny settlement of Point Richmond, five miles distant, and the San Pablo and San Francisco bays beyond.

(photo shamelessly copied from Alexis Madrigal's post at the Oakland Museum of California site here)

"The Grande Vista Sanitarium (also known as the Belgum Sanitarium after its founder) has been in ruins for decades, Dr. Belgum having himself become a recluse after working so long in that isolated location."

from http://www.metafilter.com/43931/Calling-all-CitizenHistorians.  Dated 8/1/2005, accessed 1/2/2015

Ruins:

Photo credit: Sue Johnson

Welcome to Grande Vista Sanitarium!

Hendrik Nelson Belgum attended Sunny Crest School in Wisconsin.  A one-room rural school which in the late 1800s boasted about 75 pupils, Sunny Crest featured bilingual education in English and Norwegian for a community of mostly Norwegian settlers.

At some point, Belgum did whatever it was you had to do to call yourself a doctor, and one specializing in various neuroses psychoses at that.  Shortly afterwards, he did whatever it is you have to do to end up in Richmond, California -- which then, as now, was the wild, wild West.

In addition to offering 15 beds for patients, Belgum's Grande Vista Sanitarium was a home to Hendrik and his siblings Bernard, Ida and Christine.  It quartered workers for the sanitarium as well.  Life may have seemed to take place on an elevated plane what with classical music, fresh air, what was undoubtedly organic honey from the sanitarium bees, and mostly likely loads of kale as well.

In 1948, a brush fire ran through the hills like they do around here.  Dr. Belgum fought it and lost.  Grande Vista passed to his brother Bernard, who spent his time roaming the hills of what today we call Wildcat Canyon.   His sisters continued to live in the house with him.  The house, however, began to change.  A relative recalls visiting as a little boy:

"The library with its newspapers stacked to the ceiling. The king chair in the hallway, the old cow painting on the landing of the stairs, painted by a famous CA artist that my cousin now owns. The huge dining room we had thanksgiving dinner in. The kitchen that Barney spent all his time in in his later years as he was not walking and was wheel chair bound. The billiard room with the antique pool table, which my cousin now owns, with thousands of dead bees all along the walls and floor; the barn with the old wagons up a hill . . ."

     -- Bill Hoffland, in Frisco Vista comments

Bernard roamed the hills until he could no longer, whereupon he moved into the kitchen.  When he died in 1963 the grounds were abandoned.  I don't know what happened to his sisters or the other people who lived there.

Ever since Hendrik created the Grande Vista Sanitarium it seems locals have been suspicious of what goes on there.  The few stories you can find today tend to mention harassment by locals curious about what is going on with the rich people up on the hill.  Vandalism and paranoia seem to be a theme when one reads up on the little history that's easily available on the internet about Belgum.

The grounds of Grande Vista were abandoned after Bernard died in 1963.  The house itself burned in 1977.  In 1978, the East Bay Regional Park District purchased the land to include as a part of Wildcat Canyon Park -- just uphill from me.

Belgum site:

The road to Belgum (with informational posters):

Bumps on a log with a view of San Pablo Bay and Mount Tamalpais in the distance:

Heavily pollarded tree in what was the orchard:

The palms planted long ago - most famous feature of the site.  Also where I was accosted by Ruby-Crowned Kinglets: