Orange in psychology is associated with healing though this was not the why behind my own affection for orange — particularly orange calcite (See photo on the right). As an amateur geologist since boyhood stones and fossils have always “spoken to me” in both the objective empirical & scientific sense and in the artistic/aesthetic sense. Laying aside the New Age world’s obsession with specific stones and correcting or realigning “out of balance chakras”, I believe the color and texture of specific stones can trigger neurocognitive circuitry in the human brain that is associated with healing & our sense of wellness (So far as I know hard scientific evidence for this is lacking at present though I suspect it will emerge in the future). Orange and red-orange help encourage this IMO. I also can’t help but think that holding a rough stone in some way links us to ancestral hominins such as Homo erectus populations in Africa (and beyond) who fashioned crude choppers and such from rocks (Oldowan technology). They can also serve as a focus for releasing faith (To this end I pray the Shema Israel & Lord’s prayer three times daily while holding 2 or more orange calcite stones. Nature’s rosary as it were). Shaul of Tarsus (St. Paul) had “handkerchiefs” he prayed over and distributed to believers in need of healing, deliverance, and such, I have my orange calcite stones which I freely gift to those who express a desire to use them to help facilitate or release their faith. From the journal Nature (31 March 2021): Innovative Homo sapiens 105,000 years ago collected calcite crystals: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03419-0
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What do you believe is the origin of most UFOs/UAPs which have been reported down through the years? And what of those captured on film and then digital technology? (I have a UFO/UAP story for you, but I will not delve right into it. First some background and then the account). Now the possibility that advanced lifeforms on a faraway world had developed spacecraft capable of interstellar travel seemed possible to me as a young man, but (I had to ask myself) was it probable that one of these civilizations had not only achieved this but also located earth and was visiting it? What bothered me about a lot of UFO accounts was the fact the occupants of these advanced spacecraft behaved, well, kinda strangely. By this I mean they did not seem to do a good job of hiding their presence or even at times their intentions (i.e., to gather data or samples from earth and sometimes its people), and yet they seemingly had made no attempt to communicate with any of the pilots or law enforcement people who encountered them or with any military or civilian ground communications facilities. Surely aliens capable of constructing and flying spacecraft which had been observed violating/circumventing the known laws of physics would have no problem figuring out how best to communicate with humans and who best to send some kind of message to. I was around when Sputnik was launched and never failed to be fascinated by newspaper and TV stories on all the satellites, spacecraft, and robot landers that followed. The same could be said of all the UFO stories and photos I came across in the media. But what did I know? I was just a kid with a lot of unanswered questions who might have missed something somewhere. This however didn’t deter me from reading material and watching TV news stories which showcased what both skeptics and those convinced UFOs were alien contraptions had to say. In the fall of 1969, I was a freshman high school student who loved science, had a lot of unanswered questions, and a father who indulged my quest for empirical answers by providing me with some basic lab equipment, a microscope, and a 3.5-inch refractor telescope. After dinner each weeknight I would haul my telescope outside along with some astronomy books and celestial charts, and spend hours looking at Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, and especially the moon. On weekends I used my telescope and a suitable screw-in eyepiece filter to study and track sunspots and then make entries about them in a notebook I kept for this purpose. Though I never saw any object in the heavens above me (or buzzing about the terrain around me) I could not ultimately identify, I held out hope that someday I’d catch sight of a UFO doing something nothing in nature and no known human technology could touch. 1969 has been called the year in which everything changed. And it was in so many ways and on so many levels. My commencing high school aside, 1969 was the year our species first set foot on its celestial dance partner (Niel Armstrong and then Buzz Aldrin set foot on its moon on July 20) and it was also the year that the (University of Colorado) Condon Committee report on UFOs was published in book form. I picked up the paperback version which ran almost 1,000 pages! I gave both my undivided attention: I watched hours on end of the Apollo 11 astronauts on the moon on TV (Lubbock, Texas) and pretty much read the (Condon Committee) “Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects” through in a few days time. The “Scientific Study…” proved an education in how the scientific method is employed to dissect evidence (or lack of it). What struck me as out of kilter was the fact the cases represented but a small sample of the available ones and reflected a kind of cherry-picking (possibly skewed to favor reaching an almost predictable conclusion). Around this same time, I came across Erich von Daniken’s (book) “Chariots of the Gods” which argued that aliens helped humans build the Egyptian pyramids, Stonehenge, and other ancient engineering marvels. This theme had actually appeared in various sci-fi books and movies long before von Daniken and also was part of a nonfiction narrative advanced by British journalist Harold T. Wilkins in 1954. However, while it can be argued that some UFO/UAP accounts and recordings cannot be indisputably shown to have a prosaic explanation (as in a natural or human-made source/origins), the same cannot be said of von Daniken’s “evidence” for ancient astronauts and their influence on various cultures. I discovered this myself in books such as Dr. Clifford Wilson’s 1972 book Crash Go The Chariots (which you can borrow and read by clicking this link: Crash go the chariots! (1972 edition) | Open Library) and Ronald Story’s 1976 The Space Gods Revealed: A Close Look At The Theories of Erich von Däniken (low cost used copies of which are often available from Thriftbooks.com The Space-Gods Revealed: A Close Look at… book by Ronald D. Story (thriftbooks.com) My interest in UFOs and the possibility of alien lifeforms never waned but did shift from anecdotes to informed scientific speculation in the realm of exobiology and technology (SETI). During the mid-1980s through 1998, I devoted a lot of my free time to caring for, breeding, and training birds. Click to read about this. Naturally, I wound up frequently local per supply stores especially one in Old Town shopping center starting in 1985. The clerk at this particular store, Ray, loved birds, knew a lot about them, not just books he read but also pet birds he kept and cared for. As Ray and I became better acquainted over time our small talk shifted beyond birds to all kinds of other topics. During one memorable conversation in 1987, we touched on exobiology and UFOs. After voicing concerns and reservations with many UFO sighting reports and “alien contact accounts”, Ray responded by saying, “I saw one. A UFO. Close up”. Intrigued, I asked him to give me details on his sighting. He took me back in time to 1980 and a still, quiet, clear night in New Jersey not so far from Trenton. At the time Ray was driving alongside an open field when he spotted a triangle-shaped craft floating (he estimated) about 60 feet or so above the grassy flatland and about 90 yards from the edge of the road he was driving on. Though spooked, he pulled his car over, shut off the engine, and walked towards the stationary UFO. As Ray got closer he saw circular lights under the craft with 3 large lights, one on each of the triangle’s points. I asked Ray if he heard any noise. He told me the entire field and a line of trees in the distance were dead still and quiet and no wind was blowing. The UFO was hovering in the air and making no noise whatsoever. When he got within perhaps 30 yards of the craft it began moving silently and slowly away from him. Ray stopped his approach to see if the UFO would stop moving but it did not. It proceeded to move slowly away from him and towards a line of trees in the distance. It then sped up and disappeared from view. Ray returned to his car and went home somewhat shaken by his encounter with the craft. He turned on his TV and radio to see if others had seen the UFO and called in their sightings into the media or police or both. There were no stories of this sort on either radio or TV. The next day Ray checked his local newspaper and drew a blank. I knew from past conversations that Ray was a keen observer of animals and especially birds he came across in local parks and in the wild and was also a teetotaler who had never messed with illicit drugs. I also was aware of the fact that he was a very healthy man in his thirties who rarely even got a cold (and when he did he relied on herbal remedies only for symptomatic relief). And, I had never caught him in a lie nor found him to be fantasy-prone or given to experiencing auditory or visual hallucinations. He did in fact not believe in ghosts or the paranormal and was not a religious or spiritual man. I then asked Ray if he thought the UFO he observed was an extraterrestrial visitor. He said, “Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. I know only one thing for sure and that is the fact I’d never heard about, read about, or seen anything anywhere about such a..uh.…aircraft or spacecraft..prior to seeing it“. Following our conversation on the triangle-shaped UFO, I did some digging and discovered that Naval Air Engineering Station Lakehurst was not that far from where Ray had been that fateful night — as the crow (or aircraft) flies, that is. This base was, at the time of Ray’s sighting, the largest military installation in NJ and also had the dubious distinction of being where the mammoth airship/dirigible Hindenburg went up in flames on May 6, 1937. It sported lots of runways and had jets coming and going a great deal of the time but to my knowledge had never been linked to test flights involving experimental aircraft by the press or anyone else. Be this as it may, I could not help but believe that what Ray had seen and described to me was an experimental aircraft possibly flown out of NAES Lakehurst. In the ensuing years, I have maintained an openness to the possibility that alien spacecraft or probes have graced our planet — or may show up one day in the future — albeit the only convincing evidence of this will have to surmount rigorous scrutiny (A winnowing process that must take into account skies that are increasingly filled with highly sophisticated drones, experimental aircraft and such). Are Most UFOs Just Secret Warplanes (Like This Use To Be)? Emails Show Navy’s ‘UFO’ Patents Went Through Significant Internal Review, Resulted In A Demo (thedrive.com) Navy “UFO Patent” Documents Talk Of “Spacetime Modification Weapon,” Detail Experimental Testing Copyright 2021 by Dr. Anthony G. Payne. All rights reserved. |
More about Summer Cloud
Summer Cloud is an American Indian (Tribal member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma) who, though reared in the Southern Baptist faith tradition, realized early on that many of the so-called sacred dogmas, creeds and beliefs he had been taught were at serious variance with the findings of historical researchers, Biblical scholars, Biblical archeologists, physical anthropologists, geologists and more. As you might expect, a boy who openly argued for modifying or throwing out beliefs and claims that had been invalidated was not especially popular among his conservative Protestant peers much less the leaders of the Southern Baptist church he attended. In time his critical thinking mindset propelled him on a quest for an expression of faith that both incorporated and reflected the findings of science and scholarship. In 1980 he became a Roman Catholic (Charismatic) and in 2015 he became a lay monk in the transdemoninational Knights of Prayer Monastic Order (Full monk in 2017) as well as a monk in several other religious communities & monastic organizations which are part of the New Monasticism movement. In 2017 he took the name "Brother Anthony of the Resurrection". He characterizes his faith development stage today as "messianic Nazarene" (Covenanted & learning how to live and apply the Torah as Yeshua the Messiah, James the Just and the Apostle Paul intended). Dr. Payne has been a Mensan since 1985. Categories
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