Part One
Just after New Year, I received an email from a friend with a URL to an article on Jeff Rense’s site. And so I was introduced to Stan Romanek’s mystery equations. More than two weeks later, I am still confused on many points, but not on Mr. Romanek’s aliens. The question is not so much about whom, as it is about why?
I’m of the “show me the Alien” school of evidence. Extra-ordinary claims required extra-ordinary proof. So far, and I’ve been looking now for over 30 years, the evidence has proven to be very thin and inexplicably inconclusive. We have some evidence, admittedly vague, fragmented and open to a wide variety of interpretations, from ancient sources, and we have a complex pattern of non-human interaction continuing throughout the history of alchemy, witchcraft and magick. In the 19th century, we have phantom airships and in the 20th we have flying discs. Are they the hardware of alien excursionists, or just the artefacts of our own unconscious evolution, or something even stranger? (See my online book The UFO Enigma for an overview of the points raised in this section.)
We have no way to know, and one reason for this basic uncertainty lies in the sudden interest in the phenomenon by the American intelligence communities after 1947. Based on their involvement in and the public reactions to both Roswell and the Maury Island Incident in the summer of 1947, American intelligence quite rightly determined that the phenomenon was primarily psychological and proceeded from that basis. This led to a somewhat schizoid mind-set in which one branch of intelligence was collecting reports while another branch was managing those who made the reports. This confusion, understandable only to those inside of the intelligence communities, led to an underground of UFO conspiracy theorists where every researcher was free to pursue whatever piece of ignorance or manipulation struck a surrealistic chord in their imagination.
By the time the FBI got around to investigating contactee groups, the zietgeist had moved on once again. Also, as with the Maury Island Incident, science fiction was involved, except this time it was Television. It was no accident that Betty and Barney Hill’s “aliens” looked and sounded and acted like the “aliens” they saw the week before on the “Outer Limits” TV show. These similarities were only revealed under hypnosis, bringing a key element of quasi-spiritualism into the already volatile psychic mixture.
Just as the extremely questionable experiences of a pilot’s unusual mirage, translated by a hack reporters use of an odd metaphor, sparked a revolution in the way we experience the collective Other, so too did the strange mixture of science fiction and psychosis create a series of contexts in which to assess the event’s meaning. Roswell and Maury Island were the initial incidents in the pattern of the first wave, and the Hill’s experience introduced the new “contextural” framework for the next wave. We are still awaiting the third wave, as the current context runs through its myriad of possible combinations derived from the ever-change face of the Other in popular consciousness.
And that’s just the point. Once the intelligence communities discovered that the UFO underground was ripe for a sort of picking, very strange things began to happen. Taken from a purely psychological perspective it made a great deal of sense to control, and even manipulate, such a volatile and expansive need in a significant segment of the population. However such attempts at manipulation created feedback effects that morphed the contextual syntax into so many varieties of imaginative exuberance, far beyond what anyone inside the project ever imagined, that all meaning was rendered down to conjecture: What do you mean when you say “alien?”
Since as I write this we have a robot exploring an ancient lakebed on Mars, the irony is somewhat acute. We have become the hardware aliens that so frightened us half a century ago…
So do THEY exist? Have they been trying to phone earth and getting just the low techno hum of the pre-industrial until the last century or so? Or have they been visiting, controlling, manipulating and inspiring us for millennia? And if so, what could we deduce about THEM from the pieces of information, the residue and traces of their existence, THEY leave behind? Such is the state of UFO studies: the believers get it and see all kinds of evidence, while the sceptics are still ranting about actually “seeing” an alien.
To even begin to resolve that conflict, we must indulge in a thought problem, a conjectural game of “what if” so that we have some standard for evaluating the data. This hypothetical “map” or scenario gives us some coherence in the face of the raw details, but if it doesn’t describe the data set, then we have to discard it and design a new one.
Since we can’t make assumptions for an unproven “alien” race, we really can’t speculate how they would carry out contact. But, and here’s our thought problem, we can speculate on how someone who wanted the world to believe in the “aliens” would stage such a contact. This set of parameters would depend on several variables, but not as many as a real “first contact” might. For this reason, it makes a good deductive touchstone.
The first two variables are set and setting. The contact scenario would have to fit the times and expectations of the people it was meant to convince. And it would have to recapitulate the history of the UFO contact scenario it was meant to validate. The third variable is the pay off: enough advanced information must be given to demonstrate authority, but that information must be discernable in the mass of current intelligence for it to be credible. The shock is not the absolute novelty of the information, which is minimal, but the insistence, reinforced by careful attention to set and setting, on its literal truth.
So let’s imagine how such a scenario would play out. An unexplainable event is staged before a variety of subjects in a city where psy-ops and local reality testing is well established. The people who experience the event are observed, and the ones who match a profile for “true believer” status are the focus of subsequent encounters. Once a true believer is chosen, then other details are added the mix, evidence of various kinds, and a subconscious urge to explore the event further is triggered. This creates a need for the kind of experience related to the second wave of the UFO experience. This need, and its subsequent evolution into a connection to the unconsciousness, via mediumship or hypnosis or dreams, is manipulated to produce a kind of false revelation, the pay off phase, in which faux insights are revealed as a kind of “truth” supported and validated by the totality of the scenario.
Done correctly, such a contact scenario could be enormously influential, as we can discern from past trends in the UFO movement. Ultimately though, this kind of static can be used in the sense we are approaching here: as a kind of filter for hoaxing. When we apply it that way to the current UFO demi-flap, Mr. Stan Romanek and his mystery equations, we are astonished by the results. As I said above, the question focuses not on whom but on why…
Part TwoFor over three years now, since December 2000, Stan Romanek and his family and friends have been living the life of an X-file in the twilight zone. He has seen and videotaped several UFOs, and had something of a contact experience that left scratches, phosphorescent traces and a burned spot on his lawn. He has been shown bits of esoteric mathematics, diagrams of solar systems and ³folding space,² as well as, most recently, an alignment of Orion with a hyper-cube. Mr. Romanek claims to be as mystified as every one else and stubbornly clings to a certain folksy ignorance while shrewdly promoting his experience. The following a simple chronology, put together from Mr. Romanek¹s on words and descriptions, (see http://www.neilslade.com/ufos.html) with a few editorial additions:While living in Colorado on December 27, 2000 at about 11:30 AM I drove up to the mountains to video tape the scenery to show my girlfriend. At the time she was living in Nebraska. As I was driving to my destination I noticed the traffic had slowed and everyone was looking off to my left. As I turned my head to see what they were looking at I noticed something hovering above the power lines… I then grabbed my video camera and pulled over as I did it straighten up and accelerated so fast it made a popping noise it stopped at about 1000 feet. I got it on tape. But from that point on my life has been a nightmare.Stan Romanek¹s original UFO; still from video © 2000 Stan RomanekSeptember 1, 2001 there were a few of us driving back from Pennsylvania where I had business to attend to when my fiancé said she saw something up in the sky. We were dumbfounded to find it was a UFO, a perfect disk we took turns watching it with the binoculars.(September 21, 2001) There was a big red sphere pulsating about 500 feet above my work. It slowly floated off to the NE, after it went away I closed up and high tailed it home. That’s when I noticed it had returned and seemed to be following me home. When I got home I ran upstairs and got my camera and taped it. A bunch of us were outside watching this thing. The next morning I woke up and found I had gapping wounds in my back, and had the hair and skin rubbed of my wrists. The strange thing was it didn’t hurt and healed really fast. I also remembered that I had a bad dream that night. On September 22, 2001 I was invited to an astronomy party at a place called Daniel’s Park. It was dark and as I was driving up to the park I noticed that the surrounding area was blinking red, I looked to see if I left my blinker on but I did not then I noticed it. It was a lot closer this time. As I got to the top of the hill it turned left and flew right over everyone that was up there for the party, there were a lot of scared people up there after that. What ever this thing was it was pretty bold and didn’t seem to care what or who saw it.The next time I saw the object it was the big one! On September 30th I had just got off work and was coming home from getting gas for my van. It was in the middle of Lakewood Colorado a suburb of Colorado. I saw a beam of light hit the ground next to my van, and then sweep across the van. I thought it was a police helicopter so I rolled down my window and waved at what ever it was beaming me then I noticed all the traffic had stopped and as I drove through the intersection people were leaning out the windows and were staring at me! There it was again this time I was mad and tried to chased it. As I did it shot off right over a park were a bunch of people were having a party I got out my camera and got some real good shots of it so did the people at the park.July 2002 regression and equation from first encounter (12/27/00) hypnotic regression resulted in a page of remembered equations, image #1 at http://www.rense.com/general46/stan1.html, as well as a planetary alignment, image #2, that Mr. Romanek feels is a date. This was subsequently ³fixed² to give image #3, which does in fact give a date of December 12th, 2003. Mr. Romanek now disagrees with this interpretation, insisting that the original is the correct ³date.²On August 30, 2002, at about 2:00am in the morning, something woke us up. Even with our eyes closed we could notice the bright lights filling our room and flashing through our eyelids. It seemed to happen once every couple of seconds flash after flash! If I would have at least looked down I would have noticed the object spinning on the road in front of our parked van, as it turned out I had to wait to replay the tape before we noticed it. As you watched the camera pan down for a short moment there it is.September 3rd, 2002 second set of equations: Upon waking, my wife noticed alarm clock was upside down. Then we both noticed there were pens, pencils and paper in and around are bed. Lying next to me was this equation in my hand writing. I have no idea how I did it in total darkness and asleep…One evening on September 7, 2002 my wife decided to go sit on the front step and watch the cats play. I heard her yell to come watch our cat Lacey she was acting very odd. When I got out side we watched in amazement, as the cat seemed to be stalking something that was not there. She was concentrating in the area of where the object had been on the ground in front of the van a few weeks prior.On November 18, 2002 at 3:00 in the morning I woke up out side in only my shorts I was kneeling by a tree throwing up. When I tried to get back in to the house the doors were locked I went to the bedroom window and woke up my wife to let me in. when she did she immediately noticed that once again there was opened wounds in my back and that I was also tightly grasping something in my hand! I would later find out that I got a broken rib from this experience! When the sun finally came up a big circle was burned in the grass by our garage and within a few weeks the grass was completely deadJanuary 5, 2003, correction (?) on bedroom window: It was drawn on the window, again in my handwriting.October 10, 2003, third set of drawings, this time of Orion/hypercube alignment: I drew this down after a vivid dream I had in October 10, 2003. No idea what it means. When I did this, I did it freehand and I have no idea how I drew it so straight. I tried to duplicate it again freehand and in no way can I get it this good…Strange.November and December 2003 An interpretation of the revised ³star chart² points to December 12, 2003. A minor flap ensues, in which Mr. Romanek denies the date¹s validity and stands behind his original drawing – 12/07/03, see http://www.rense.com/general45/stan.htm December 30, 2003 Jeff Rense publishes Mr. Romanek¹s equations and drawings. A lively discussion as to their meaning ensued, which is where the Romanek affair rests at the moment.Certainly a fascinating yarn, but is the whole thing a hoax? A real ET encounter? Some imaginative blend of the two, perhaps? A disinformation campaign? Or something even stranger, even more inexplicable?
Part Three Now that we have the data, let¹s apply our theory and its series of variables. A believably designed narrative of the inexplicable, as we noted above, has three main concerns: set, setting and pay off. Observing how each of these is handled allows us to determine the degree of design, or control, that went into crafting the narrative. As I noted above in part one, an intentionally designed UFO encounter narrative would pay close attention to certain variables. It would have to fit the times and expectations of those it was meant to convince. And it would have to recapitulate the history of the UFO contact scenario it was meant to validate. These threads we may think of as the interconnected set and setting of the narrative. In a made up story, these threads would intertwine and reinforce each other. In narratives of real events, this is not the case. Mr. Romanek¹s experiences of December 2000 through September of 2001 can be considered classic first wave UFO experiences. A strange object doing strange things is spotted in the sky. A photograph, or video in this case, is taken, and the object begins to interact, sometimes violently, with the observer. There are multiple witnesses, videotape, physical evidence and so on. Mr. Romanek has no explanation for his experience, but its basic reality is unshakeable. And it is the very inexplicable reality of that experience that drives Mr. Romanek to seek answers on a deeper level.In July of 2002, he went to a hypnotist for a regression. In this regression, he recovered the first set of equations and an ecliptic alignment of planets that he sensed was somehow a date. Note the similarity to proof offered in the Hill case, star charts and vague memories of superior mathematics. The sense of recapitulating the entire history of UFO and contactee-ism is very strong. All too easily, and all too often, inexplicable hardware experiences slide into software encounters with the denizens of dreams, the astral plane and the collective unconscious. It is as if the extra-ordinary intrusion of the unexplainable, a common event throughout human history, automatically stimulates a psychic response. Whether it is a shaman, a priest, a medium or a hypnotist, faced with the pressure of this psychic response, we turn to a specialist. The specialist validates our world-view; lets us know that the inexplicable event really has a meaning, a value in our life or in the life of the tribe.And that¹s just what the hypnotist did for Mr. Romanek; the regression enhanced his sense of meaning, his involvement with the mystery, and he emerged ready to engage the inexplicable and get a few answers this time.A month or so later, the next phase of his experience kicked in, this time not so much hardware, no whizzing and blinking UFOs, but more an encounter with a local ³elemental.² This led to a visit, classic in its folkloric simplicity, to an alternative or fairy realm and his sudden return experience, again quite classical in type. From this, Mr. Romanek¹s experience evolved into more equations, the first in September of 2002, a correction of sorts in January of 2003 and the diagram of Orion and the hyper-cube in October 2003. The strange equations, then, can be considered as the pay off, the punch line to the odd yarn that makes its reality unassailable. But before we turn to those equations, a few more points must be made about set and setting.Mr. Romanek himself is the key component. He fits the important point of being almost a non-entity or a cipher in personality when the events began. He is important only because he became involved. He stopped, shot videotape, showed it to his friends, and so on. Otherwise, he is just a simple guy, without much education, who just happened to have an inexplicable experience. Yet, as shown by his subsequent reaction to the events, he does fit the ³true believer² profile. The experience can be demonstrated as ³real,² with independent witnesses and images on videotape complete with breathless ³Blair Witch Project² narration. Set and setting here are almost perfect, the personality and the experience tuned to all the current impressions while still recapitulating motifs as old as the phenomenon itself. So far, our hypothesized pattern of a designed encounter holds up well. But the deciding factor, the pay off, the punch line, is apparently missing. But only apparently, because the experience, real as it seems to be, cannot be allowed to exist in a limbo of inexplicable-ness by those who truly want to believe. Some of those who saw the UFO just filed it away as strange, but not a part of their life. Some of the others became interested, maybe even read a few books on UFOs. But only Stan Romanek plunged in with all his energy. This qualified him as a ³true believer² and led directly to his next level of involvement. Had Mr. Romanek allowed his experiences to end in September 2001, we might quite charitably agree on the reality of the event, while withholding judgment on its meaning or inherent value. The lack of an apparent third variable, the pay off, doesn¹t mean that the events were in fact spontaneous intrusions and responses. Something was cruising through Denver in 2000 and 2001, but as with the airship intrusions of a little more than a century earlier, that Something Other was perceived according to our pre-programmed responses. Mr. Romanek, entranced by the mute strangeness of the phenomenon, slapped the Tar Baby of the Weird in hopes of getting a response, a pay off of meaning that would make the inherent inexplicableness of the experience into something of value.That Something Other is our ³alien¹ whether it be an actual UFO, government or interplanetary, a visionary experience or just a lost balloon. It doesn¹t matter because our response to it seems to be the same. We embark on a personal quest for the pay off. For some, this is easily achieved by reference to the mass mythologies of their era. Christians see angels, Muslims see Djinn and 20th century folk see flying saucers and Spielburg¹s aliens But for others, just a few perhaps, the response becomes personal and interactive. And it is at this point – where designed encounters merge with the natural inclination of the human psyche – that the apparent pay off or the designed meaning can be inserted into the scenario. For the true believer, the personal quest will always result in some kind of answer. Manipulating this answer can be very easy, if the basic assumptions of the quest are kept in mind. In Mr. Romanek¹s case, this quest for a sense of meaning and value for his inexplicable experiences resulted in a set of equations, labelled in the article on Jeff Rense¹s website as images #1 through #6. (In this group, images #2 and #3 are the disputed star charts/ecliptic alignment. They serve no purpose, except to show how easy it is to twist the information in the face of an unconscious need for an explanation: Mr. Romanek¹s ³feeling² that his slightly skewed standard version of the ecliptic arrangement of the planets is in fact a date developed after the hypnosis session and was then distorted to produce a ³date.²) And it is to these pieces of the puzzle, Romanek¹s Holy Grail of mystery equations and diagrams, images #1, #4, #5 and #6, to which we now turn our attention.
Part FourFirstly, we must be clear on what we have. Mr. Romanek had a series of encounters with something inexplicable, event X. Searching for an answer to the existential questions raised by event X, Mr. Romanek turned to his own unconscious, and the spirit realm, as a source of information. This is the essence of a religious response, not a scientific one. Science, strangely enough, has a way of dealing with much greater ambiguity than religion could ever tolerate. The scientific answer of ³inconclusive: need more data² is very unsatisfying to those who are persuaded by spiritual certainties. But in Mr. Romanek¹s case, his spiritual certainties resulted in a hard science pay off. This, in its own way, is a prime example of what you seek, you¹ll surely find. It can also appear suspiciously like a scripted response to the third variable, the perfectly crafted punch line.To understand that insight, we must look at the results, the equations and diagrams, as we would look at any other intellectual or literary endeavour, without considering their supposedly miraculous origin. When we do that, a few things jump out at us immediately:1) There is nothing new or startling here. The information is more in the form of notes a science fiction author might generate to give his yarn a degree of plausibility, especially images #1 and #6.2) The message is superficial and somewhat transparent. It is easy to read it straight up as: We have a way to create manageable black holes, through some process involving an unknown element, 115, that creates an electro-magnetic field so dense it folds space/time. We are from this star in Orion and we are coming to your planet this way.3) Once we have deciphered this message, and it takes an intelligent college student roughly one to three hours to solve it via the Internet, we are left wondering why the ³aliens² from Orion didn¹t just say so to begin with. If they were from Orion using this technology, why not print out the first message and pass it out on the street? That would certainly be more convincing than burying it in Stan Romanek¹s unconscious.So is it the perfectly crafted pay off, the ultimate punch line to a UFO hoax, conscious or unconscious? Well, maybeTo see what I mean, we must look a little closer at those equations and diagrams.In #1, we see, in the upper left, helium being broken down into hydrogen and used to ³bombard² the unknown element with the atomic number 115. The correct notation for that element is given, with a few minor quirks. This is equated with part of Maxwell¹s field equations. This is equated with a diagram, concentric circles with a right arrow from the center circle¹s edge to the outside, which is in turn equated with a diagram of Orion and our system with ³wormholes² between them. Next, this is again equated to the concentric circle diagram this time with Drake¹s Equation for the chances of life in the universe. Below this is a diagram of folding space/time, going from straight to curved. And that¹s the core of the message. It¹s a sort of calling card or Voyager placard of an alien species¹ main achievement and place of residence. Or that¹s what it would be if this story were a science fiction story Its superficial transparency argues for its being scripted, consciously or unconsciously, as a way to meet the pressure of those inexplicable events. Its components are readily available in the UFO literature, element 115 from Bob Lazar, the Maxwell¹s equations from Tom Bearden, Drake¹s equation from Carl Sagan, and so onThe choice of Orion, though, is interesting, as we will see later. This suggests that more than just a random close choice was involved. Orion is a clue to a deeper motivation, and an even deeper level of scripting.The equations in image #4 are somewhat more problematic. They show some understanding of the material presented, basic computations in quantum mechanics, and some ability to actually do the math, but in the end, there is no conclusion, or even a coherent approach. Some things simply do not fit; Faraday¹s law, prominently displayed in the center of the page, doesn¹t seem to have anything to do with the quantum equations that precede it, for instance. Nor does it seem to fit with the mathematical description of a black hole that comes immediately after it. Somehow, we might expect something more, some coherent line of reasoning that connects, for example, the mysterious element 115 and those recurrent quantum mechanical and electromagnetic expressions. But here we have fluff, disguised as something meaningful until we look closely at the content. Then it dissolves like cotton candy in a thunderstorm. At best, it is just more window dressing for that science fiction novelThe ³equation² in image #5 is even more meaningless. Maybe it is a correction of some kind, or perhaps a statement of general principles. Without definitions for its single letter terms, it is essentially meaningless. Together, #4 and #5 suggests a manufactured or consciously scripted piece of business. They appear to support the original concepts, when in fact they are not even distantly related, or in fact virtually meaningless, as in #5. Image #6 however is something different. Here we see a hyper-cube, a 4 dimensional solid that is an analogue of the 3D cube, with Orion on one outer face/cell of the hyper-cube and our solar system on the opposite inner face/cell. The symbol developed in image #1 for a ³wormhole² connects a star in Orion¹s belt and the earth. We are even given precise information on which star, and which two planets in that system the ³wormhole² is coming from Along with it, we have our original concentric circles and arrow, with the symbols for folding space. This image, above all the others, should make the message crystal clear.Indeed it does, because when we look for this particular star system, we find something very curious. The large-scale image of Orion points to Mintaka, and the insert image shows a star in the region of Mintaka. Whether it does or doesn¹t ³actually² point to Mintaka as drawn is not relevant, because the basic information on the usual astronomy program suggest that Mintaka was meant. Using any up to date astronomy software, we can identify the star indicated as HIP25905, a magnitude 8 star about 124.5 light years away. This star, a class G5 V, is a close match for our sun, a G2 V class star. Such a star would be roughly half again hotter than our sun, so it would have no close planets. A planet at roughly the distance of Venus would have the surface temperature of Mercury. That suggests that the planets in that system noted in image #6 would be roughly at the distance of Earth and Mars. They might support life, but only just barely on the inner planet.We might think of this as an extra touch of plausibility. If this information pointed to somewhere that wasn¹t close to our sun in distance and stellar type, then the whole point of Drake¹s Equation is lost. But a close by world with a similar stellar type and planetary arrangement, all within the bounds of plausibility, makes a very good pay off. We can comfortably believe that the ³aliens² might in fact be from just such a system (All of the above points, which I took the time to verify for myself, can be found in the comments included with Stan Romanek¹s mystery equations at the URL given above. The speed with which the message was translated, more or less, by this group is actually evidence of its designed transparency.)However, one curious point remains. Is that hyper-cube symbolic of the black hole folding space/time process? Or does it somehow connect the idea of Orion with something down here on Earth. And could it provide us with a date, which Mr. Romanek feels is hidden in his information?Indeed it could, and the reasons why take us back to Egypt, and forward again to the Stargate Conspiracy. The date, once we focus on the correct context, is there for all to see
Part FiveIn the mid 1990s, roughly fifty years after the first wave began, the third wave of UFO interaction began to solidify into the vague parameters of a new paradigm. This new paradigm had a very old source, the gods of ancient Egypt, and a very bizarre cast of characters promoting it. Once again, the power of science fiction was used to crystallize the archetype. Picknett and Prince¹s book, the Stargate Conspiracy, details how the interesting idea of ET and the Egyptians gained influence in the intelligence Underground. Their theories are quite plausible, and their facts are accurate for the most part. We may consider this as the intelligence community¹s response to the inexplicable events of the UFO phenomenon. That doesn¹t however mean they were wrongIn 1994, Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert published a mostly non-fiction work entitled The Orion Mystery, which became something of an international bestseller. This book suggests that the three pyramids on Giza are a reflection of the three stars in Orion¹s belt, and proposed that the southern shafts in the Great Pyramid did in fact, in 2405 BCE, point to both Sirius, the blocked Queen¹s shaft, and to Alnitak, one of the Belt Stars of Orion, through the open air shaft in the King¹s Chamber. To most folks, the three stars of Orion are therefore linked directly to the three pyramids on Giza. Even the Egyptologists, the most conservative of scholars, would now agree that some connection, in terms of placement and image, exists between Orion and Giza.Robert Bauval had already sketched out the groundwork in a series of articles published in the journal Discussions in Egyptology, speculating that the arrangement of pyramids on the ground were influenced by the Belt Stars of Orion. The most fascinating part of The Orion Mystery, however, grew out of the work done by a German engineer hired to clear out the rubble from the airshafts, and his discovery of a hidden chamber at the end of the shaft in the Queen¹s chamber. This discovery led to a large amount of work, both inside the Great Pyramid, and out on the plateau to the west, which no one seems to want to discuss. Also, accurate surveys of the angles involved demonstrated that all four shafts pointed to stars in the era of 2405 BCE. When these were put together, as in The Orion Mystery, it created a powerful sense of how advanced the Egyptians really were, and gave a considerable degree of credibility to the ³stargate² paradigm. On another somewhat parallel track, the Stargate Conspiracy folks were trying to get their ideas into the mass consciousness and were promoting a new science fiction movie, which went into production at almost the same moment Rudolph Gantenbrink made his discoveries. Opening in October of 1994, a few months after The Orion Mystery was published, ³Stargate,² the movie, was a huge success, eventually spinning off a TV show. The stage was set for a new paradigmAs the ³millennium² approached, all sorts of ideas and concepts were floated either in support of the new paradigm or against it. Plans were made to replace the capstone of the Great Pyramid, which came to nothing. The newagers latched onto the concept, with wild speculation concerning Edgar Cayce¹s ³Hall of Records² under the Sphinx, and of course, all sorts of tunnels. Any solid pieces of evidence that the pyramid complex and the Sphinx might be truly ancient or that the Pyramid texts were describing real stellar events were consigned to the general rubbish heap along with the Cayce-ites. It seemed that the Stargate Conspiracy folks had failed to crystallize their new paradigm of ³alien² contact. The monuments on Giza were locked down with a huge wall, restricting access and any visual observation of the entire site. TV shows focused on the known tunnel, under the second pyramid¹s causeway, and none other than the Director of Egyptian Antiquities on Giza told us that all such speculation was nonsense. By the summer of 2002, the vibe seemed to have died out and faded away. Either the whole thing was just a coincidence – another quirk in the strange history of man¹s imagination – or the cover-up was tightly locked into place.At just that point, Stan Romanek met the ³aliens² with their wormhole/stargate to Orion. Curiously enough, at just that moment, my small contribution to the mystery was also coming to fruition. My fascination with ancient Egypt goes all the way back to childhood. By the time I began to make trips to Egypt in the early 1990s, I was a fairly capable amateur Egyptologist. I was also acquainted with several of the principals in the loosely defined Stargate Conspiracy, Puharich, Hurtak, Graham Hancock, John Anthony West, and so had heard most of the new paradigm as it emerged. By the spring of 1995, after The Orion Mystery and ³Stargate, the Movie,² it was clear something was going on.But even I was surprised by what we found that March. The Mena House in Giza was ground zero for an international show-and-tell, at the highest levels, of something just discovered on the plateau behind the second pyramid. In between Prince Charles and Al Gore, who took the tour a few days apart, the place was filled with every major intelligence agency on the planet. In the press coverage, nowhere is it mentioned why all the VIPs were touring an obscure spot on the Giza Plateau (See article at http://www.naqshbandi.net/haqqani/features/HRH%20Prince%20Charles/prince/Prince_visits_Egypt.html for an example of the coverage.), even though that visit caused a local sensation.What happened? No one will say officially, even those who might be supposed to know. The whole subject devolved into squabbles over leaks and sources, creating the conspiracy undercurrent of the new paradigm. What is clear from the public record is that the US and Egypt reached an agreement, couched in economic terms, which resulted in a shake-up in the department of antiquities. This resulted in the lid clamping down, and the media circus as diversion. All that we know is that something very strange is happening on the Giza Plateau.My more direct involvement began in 1996 when I wrote a brief article called ³Star Birth Bardo in the Heart of Orion.² (See http://www.sangraal.com/bardorion.htm) In that article, I commented that the purpose of the pyramids was perhaps ³to open the magnetic wormhole to the star fields in Orion.² I also commented on the basic point of the alignment: A clue to the dynamics of this cosmic crisis can be found in the work of Nick Fiorenza on what he calls the “Erection of the Holy Cross.” From our location in space, orbiting the sun, the center of the galaxy lies in the direction of the zodiacal sign Sagittarius. This unmoving axis locates us in space in relation to the center of the galaxy. As we approach a spring equinox that falls at the beginning of the sign of Aquarius, our two axis, galactic and local, approach a 90 degree angle. In 1998, I wrote two other articles, see http://www.sangraal.com/millennium%20workings.htm and http://www.sangraal.com/library/gnomon.htm in which I developed the idea of the Cube of Space, from the Kabbalistic projected Tree of Life, as a real ³New Jerusalem² event in the sky based on the galactic alignment I noted in 1996. In the first article, I speculated that the concept itself, the idea of a ³cube² that created a sort of intergalactic zip code of space/time, was our best evidence of contact at some point with a galactic scale civilization.All of these ideas came together when my co-author, Jay Weidner, introduced me to Fulcanelli and we discovered that the western tradition, alchemy itself, also pointed to the same kind of cube of space geometry. In 1999, we published the first edition of A Monument to the End of Time, see http://www.aethyrea.com/aethyrea.com/AMETindex.html, in which we connected the idea of alchemy to the galactic alignment, and ended with another version of the original article, ³Star Birth Bardo.² A new edition came out in 2000, and sold moderately well.In that work, we noted that the mid point of the season of the double catastrophe, 1992 2012, predicted by Fulcanelli from the Hendaye Cross was September 22/23 2002, the fall equinox. As that date approached, I began to work on the implications. We knew why Fulcanelli had used the markers he did, and the date was correct and matched the basic pattern perfectly, but there seemed to be something more involved.So as I chewed on it, I realized that the clue was right in front of us. The link was the pyramids on Giza, as Fulcanelli shows in the first illustration in Le Mystere des cathedrals, his enigmatic masterpiece on alchemy. I published my result, showing how there was in fact cosmo-mythic components going all the way back to the ancient Egyptians. While the alignments of the Cube produced the structure, a key component was played by Orion, which at dawn on the fall equinox was high overhead, very close to its highest point for 26,000 years. This point however was not as significant, to our consideration here, as the fact that I suggested that the solar Cube of Space and the galactic Cube of Space had a hyper-cubic relationship. I published the article on my website, see http://vincentbridges.com/RaisingtheDjed.htm, and in less than two weeks had over 250,000 discrete users, 160,000 some odd of which thought it important enough to download the lengthy star charts that backed up my arguments. This connection seems to have had a direct effect on the collective unconscious. Hyper-cubes became cool, and the mystics and channelers began to prattle about hyper-dimensional portals. The Orion connection, however, was for the most part latent, and not explicit in the general assumptions.That is, until Stan Romanek published his mystery equationsConclusionAre there really aliens from Mintaka coming to visit us in black-hole driven hyper-cubes? No, I tend to doubt itMr. Romanek¹s story conforms almost too well to our pattern of a scripted or designed encounter, even to the timing of the events. The question is not who are the aliens, but who scripted this encounter?There are two choices:1) Mr. Romanek¹s experiences with the inexplicable were just that, and his explorations into hypnosis resulted in a kind of delusion where he unconsciously put together fragments of his reading and Internet research into a believable scenario, a creative act to save his sanity, in fact. This, with the exception of the original inexplicable event, covers the points of his story the best.2) Mr. Romanek¹s experiences, including his initial contact with a ³UFO,² were in fact designed to spread the thinly disguised science fiction story put together from easily available components and ideas. We might suppose some kind of mind-control, but if we do, the question is why? Why would anyone go to this much trouble to promote such an obviously and transparently fabricated story? What could be the point?Ultimately, I think we can consider 1) above the most likely. Which leaves us back with the Tar Baby of Strangeness: I¹m a sceptic until you show me the ³alien,² then once I¹ve slapped the mystery, seen the varmint, I¹m hooked, and so become a believer if I am not very careful. To see strange objects and visions in the sky may, after all, be a purely religious experience. It certainly was for Stan Romanek.Part FiveIn the mid 1990s, roughly fifty years after the first wave began, the third wave of UFO interaction began to solidify into the vague parameters of a new paradigm. This new paradigm had a very old source, the gods of ancient Egypt, and a very bizarre cast of characters promoting it. Once again, the power of science fiction was used to crystallize the archetype. Picknett and Prince¹s book, the Stargate Conspiracy, details how the interesting idea of ET and the Egyptians gained influence in the intelligence Underground. Their theories are quite plausible, and their facts are accurate for the most part. We may consider this as the intelligence community¹s response to the inexplicable events of the UFO phenomenon. That doesn¹t however mean they were wrongIn 1994, Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert published a mostly non-fiction work entitled The Orion Mystery, which became something of an international bestseller. This book suggests that the three pyramids on Giza are a reflection of the three stars in Orion¹s belt, and proposed that the southern shafts in the Great Pyramid did in fact, in 2405 BCE, point to both Sirius, the blocked Queen¹s shaft, and to Alnitak, one of the Belt Stars of Orion, through the open air shaft in the King¹s Chamber. To most folks, the three stars of Orion are therefore linked directly to the three pyramids on Giza. Even the Egyptologists, the most conservative of scholars, would now agree that some connection, in terms of placement and image, exists between Orion and Giza.Robert Bauval had already sketched out the groundwork in a series of articles published in the journal Discussions in Egyptology, speculating that the arrangement of pyramids on the ground were influenced by the Belt Stars of Orion. The most fascinating part of The Orion Mystery, however, grew out of the work done by a German engineer hired to clear out the rubble from the airshafts, and his discovery of a hidden chamber at the end of the shaft in the Queen¹s chamber. This discovery led to a large amount of work, both inside the Great Pyramid, and out on the plateau to the west, which no one seems to want to discuss. Also, accurate surveys of the angles involved demonstrated that all four shafts pointed to stars in the era of 2405 BCE. When these were put together, as in The Orion Mystery, it created a powerful sense of how advanced the Egyptians really were, and gave a considerable degree of credibility to the ³stargate² paradigm. On another somewhat parallel track, the Stargate Conspiracy folks were trying to get their ideas into the mass consciousness and were promoting a new science fiction movie, which went into production at almost the same moment Rudolph Gantenbrink made his discoveries. Opening in October of 1994, a few months after The Orion Mystery was published, ³Stargate,² the movie, was a huge success, eventually spinning off a TV show. The stage was set for a new paradigmAs the ³millennium² approached, all sorts of ideas and concepts were floated either in support of the new paradigm or against it. Plans were made to replace the capstone of the Great Pyramid, which came to nothing. The newagers latched onto the concept, with wild speculation concerning Edgar Cayce¹s ³Hall of Records² under the Sphinx, and of course, all sorts of tunnels. Any solid pieces of evidence that the pyramid complex and the Sphinx might be truly ancient or that the Pyramid texts were describing real stellar events were consigned to the general rubbish heap along with the Cayce-ites. It seemed that the Stargate Conspiracy folks had failed to crystallize their new paradigm of ³alien² contact. The monuments on Giza were locked down with a huge wall, restricting access and any visual observation of the entire site. TV shows focused on the known tunnel, under the second pyramid¹s causeway, and none other than the Director of Egyptian Antiquities on Giza told us that all such speculation was nonsense. By the summer of 2002, the vibe seemed to have died out and faded away. Either the whole thing was just a coincidence – another quirk in the strange history of man¹s imagination – or the cover-up was tightly locked into place.At just that point, Stan Romanek met the ³aliens² with their wormhole/stargate to Orion Curiously enough, at just that moment, my small contribution to the mystery was also coming to fruition. My fascination with ancient Egypt goes all the way back to childhood. By the time I began to make trips to Egypt in the early 1990s, I was a fairly capable amateur Egyptologist. I was also acquainted with several of the principals in the loosely defined Stargate Conspiracy, Puharich, Hurtak, Graham Hancock, John Anthony West, and so had heard most of the new paradigm as it emerged. By the spring of 1995, after The Orion Mystery and ³Stargate, the Movie,² it was clear something was going on.But even I was surprised by what we found that March. The Mena House in Giza was ground zero for an international show-and-tell, at the highest levels, of something just discovered on the plateau behind the second pyramid. In between Prince Charles and Al Gore, who took the tour a few days apart, the place was filled with every major intelligence agency on the planet. In the press coverage, nowhere is it mentioned why all the VIPs were touring an obscure spot on the Giza Plateau (See article at http://www.naqshbandi.net/haqqani/features/HRH%20Prince%20Charles/prince/Prince_visits_Egypt.html for an example of the coverage.), even though that visit caused a local sensation.What happened? No one will say officially, even those who might be supposed to know. The whole subject devolved into squabbles over leaks and sources, creating the conspiracy undercurrent of the new paradigm. What is clear from the public record is that the US and Egypt reached an agreement, couched in economic terms, which resulted in a shake-up in the department of antiquities. This resulted in the lid clamping down, and the media circus as diversion. All that we know is that something very strange is happening on the Giza Plateau.My more direct involvement began in 1996 when I wrote a brief article called ³Star Birth Bardo in the Heart of Orion.² (See http://www.sangraal.com/bardorion.htm) In that article, I commented that the purpose of the pyramids was perhaps ³to open the magnetic wormhole to the star fields in Orion.² I also commented on the basic point of the alignment: A clue to the dynamics of this cosmic crisis can be found in the work of Nick Fiorenza on what he calls the “Erection of the Holy Cross.” From our location in space, orbiting the sun, the center of the galaxy lies in the direction of the zodiacal sign Sagittarius. This unmoving axis locates us in space in relation to the center of the galaxy. () As we approach a spring equinox that falls at the beginning of the sign of Aquarius, our two axis, galactic and local, approach a 90 degree angle. In 1998, I wrote two other articles, see http://www.sangraal.com/millennium%20workings.htm and http://www.sangraal.com/library/gnomon.htm in which I developed the idea of the Cube of Space, from the Kabbalistic projected Tree of Life, as a real ³New Jerusalem² event in the sky based on the galactic alignment I noted in 1996. In the first article, I speculated that the concept itself, the idea of a ³cube² that created a sort of intergalactic zip code of space/time, was our best evidence of contact at some point with a galactic scale civilization.All of these ideas came together when my co-author, Jay Weidner, introduced me to Fulcanelli and we discovered that the western tradition, alchemy itself, also pointed to the same kind of cube of space geometry. In 1999, we published the first edition of A Monument to the End of Time, see http://www.aethyrea.com/aethyrea.com/AMETindex.html, in which we connected the idea of alchemy to the galactic alignment, and ended with another version of the original article, ³Star Birth Bardo.² A new edition came out in 2000, and sold moderately well.In that work, we noted that the mid point of the season of the double catastrophe, 1992 2012, predicted by Fulcanelli from the Hendaye Cross was September 22/23 2002, the fall equinox. As that date approached, I began to work on the implications. We knew why Fulcanelli had used the markers he did, and the date was correct and matched the basic pattern perfectly, but there seemed to be something more involved.So as I chewed on it, I realized that the clue was right in front of us. The link was the pyramids on Giza, as Fulcanelli shows in the first illustration in Le Mystere des cathedrals, his enigmatic masterpiece on alchemy. I published my result, showing how there was in fact cosmo-mythic components going all the way back to the ancient Egyptians. While the alignments of the Cube produced the structure, a key component was played by Orion, which at dawn on the fall equinox was high overhead, very close to its highest point for 26,000 years. This point however was not as significant, to our consideration here, as the fact that I suggested that the solar Cube of Space and the galactic Cube of Space had a hyper-cubic relationship. I published the article on my website, see http://vincentbridges.com/RaisingtheDjed.htm, and in less than two weeks had over 250,000 discrete users, 160,000 some odd of which thought it important enough to download the lengthy star charts that backed up my arguments. This connection seems to have had a direct effect on the collective unconscious. Hyper-cubes became cool, and the mystics and channelers began to prattle about hyper-dimensional portals. The Orion connection, however, was for the most part latent, and not explicit in the general assumptions.That is, until Stan Romanek published his mystery equationsConclusionAre there really aliens from Mintaka coming to visit us in black-hole driven hyper-cubes? No, I tend to doubt itMr. Romanek¹s story conforms almost too well to our pattern of a scripted or designed encounter, even to the timing of the events. The question is not who are the aliens, but who scripted this encounter?There are two choices:1) Mr. Romanek¹s experiences with the inexplicable were just that, and his explorations into hypnosis resulted in a kind of delusion where he unconsciously put together fragments of his reading and Internet research into a believable scenario, a creative act to save his sanity, in fact. This, with the exception of the original inexplicable event, covers the points of his story the best.2) Mr. Romanek¹s experiences, including his initial contact with a ³UFO,² were in fact designed to spread the thinly disguised science fiction story put together from easily available components and ideas. We might suppose some kind of mind-control, but if we do, the question is why? Why would anyone go to this much trouble to promote such an obviously and transparently fabricated story? What could be the point?Ultimately, I think we can consider 1) above the most likely. Which leaves us back with the Tar Baby of Strangeness: I¹m a sceptic until you show me the ³alien,² then once I¹ve slapped the mystery, seen the varmint, I¹m hooked, and so become a believer if I am not very careful. To see strange objects and visions in the sky may, after all, be a purely religious experience. It certainly was for Stan Romanek.