Ketroversy and UFO's near Sedona

Here is one more very curious ingredient in this weird soup surrounding Sedona. The first hand story from the late Kent Daniel Bentkowski (creator of the Ketroversy Papers Blog) is remarkably weird, and I found it very relevant to some of the previous postings. The story elements include a guy born in 1962, a lonely road outside of Sedona Arizona and a UFO. He seems to fit into a shared pattern of folks my age with certain experiences. There's more, and it's well worth listening. Kent has a slow way of talking that I find absolutely hypnotic.

This audio features a 17 minute slightly edited excerpt from an interview with Adam Gorightly from his collection of on-line podcasts, Untamed Dimensions. The interview took place (strangely enough) almost two years to the day of this posting, March 6th, 2008.

My experience of the "Lamp Shade" dream and the Blue Orb is relevant to this audio clip below. It would be advisable to read this essay in conjunction to the issues in this post here. And also this post too, where there is another story about an odd experience near Sedona. Sorry if this information seems all jumbled up and overlapping, this stuff can be overwhelming and confusing.
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audio download / 23 minutes long

NOTE: If the audio link is finicky, try refreshing this page. Or, to download directly to your hard-drive, simply click on the DivShare logo (at the right) and then click on the big ARROW labeled "Download Original"

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Is this Dondo?

There's more, and it's synchro-rific:

(added the evening of March 7th) Just minutes ago I hung up the phone after a 2 hour interview with Greg Bishop of Radio Mysterioso (more on that soon) and the ONLY question from a listener (via email) was: "What are your thoughts about Kent Daniel Bentkowski?" What? I almost dropped the phone! It was so weird to have someone ask me about Kent after I'd been finalizing this posting just minutes before starting the interview, and at that point it was still UN-posted!

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There's even more, and it's synchro-LAME:

(added the morning of March 8th) Greg Bishop emailed me last night. It seems that the "listener" with a question above was Adam Gorightly, and he knew full well that I had been working on a post with audio from Kent, and the listening audience got to hear my already mumbly voice stammer in out-and-out stupification. I was at the receiving end of a childish prank! Let the world know, equally childish retaliation is in order.
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my comrade in blogging

My sister blogger writes about her own experience with a BLUE ORB, it's a fascinating story and required reading. She posts under the name Lucretia's Heart, and her life has been awash in high strangeness. (like this, this and THIS!)

Lately, both of us have been writing about our weirdly vivid dreams.

Thankfully, she's been sharing more of her paranormal experiences in recent posts, and she even says that it was my prodding that's getting her to tell more. Maybe, but I didn't need to do much more than ask her, she was ready, and all I needed to do was give her a tiny nudge.

And, she's funny too.

audio describing the vivid lampshade dream (Laughlin 5)

Right after I had the weirdly vivid dream (from the previous post) I documented my immediate impressions into a small digital voice recorder. I'm sharing that audio, along with a little bit extra where I try and clarify some of the details.

I have no idea why this dream seems so significant.

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audio download / recorded March 5th 2010 / 14 minutes long

vivid dream and blue orb (Laughlin 4)

Glowing orange dream imagery in a pine forest at night. Click on any of these illustrations for a HI-rez close-up view.

I had a weirdly vivid dream on the night of Feb 16th. The next morning I was going to start the long drive to Laughlin Nevada for the annual UFO conference. My sleep was restless, and I had my lap top near my bed, and I listened to an audio podcast to occupy my time. Shortly after starting the podcast, I ended up asleep.

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This post has an accompanying audio file

audio download / recorded March 5th 2010 / 14 minutes long

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The dream began in a nighttime environment, and I an standing in a gravel parking lot (or gravel road) in a very distinct forest. The pine trees are evenly spaced, and there are no branches down low. The forest floor is flat without any undergrowth. I looked to my left to see a very weird orange light shining through the trees. I moved a little to get a better view, and I see that it was a simple lampshade set on the ground (or, maybe floating a few inches off the ground) and it's giving off a vibrant orange glow. Instantly, I had the thought that this was NOT a lampshade, it was some sort of hallucination, and something else was there.

Even in my dream state I clearly think about an event in a book by Dr. Karla Turner titled: INTO THE FRINGE. There was a creepy scene in that book where a witness describes seeing a “satellite dish” in his yard, but he knows it’s NOT a satellite dish, something else was there.

I look at the lampshade for just a few seconds, and then I find myself floating up off the forest floor. I rise up slow and smooth, and I think to myself: “Oh, this again.” My perception is that the experience is quite familiar, and actually very pleasant. This comforting feeling fits a pattern of what I call my reassuring dreams.

Floating above a black shape.

Soon I am levitating above the tall trees, and I am looking down into the pine forest. My floating body is positioned with a slight tilt forward, so I am sort of forced to look downward. Below me is a huge round circle, inky black against the pale orange glow in among the trees. I am above something, that I perceive to be a large saucer shaped craft, and I smoothly descend downward into the center of the circle.

Floating downward in a weirdly vibrant tube full of colorful symbols

The next thing I realize is that I am floating in a shiny glowing blue tube, slowly descending. The walls of this tube is covered with a collection of brightly colored puzzle pieces, and these are inlaid into the wall. Each of these shapes look like some sort of Egyptian hieroglyph, they seem to be made of candy colored plastic and they are back lit in a sort of frame. I’m reminded of a brightly colored child’s toy.

I'm compelled to pick out one distinct shape

I reach forward and pick out one puzzle piece, it’s as if I am drawn to this one shape. I hold it in my hand and examine it closely, it is shaped like a stylized “W” and I’m filled with an intense compulsion to remember it, and I focused on the outline of the shape. (more about this here!)

I continue down into the tube, and then I’m walking around in a series of blue rooms crowded with people. The rest of the dream is a little bit frenetic in it’s imagery.

The dream seems to culminate with a meeting of some sort in a daylight street scene . I'm in among a crowd of people, and there is a discussion by a small team. They are carefully explaining that everything is alright, and that there will soon be a wonderful event where UFO occupants will join us here on earth. It sounds logical and nice, but it seems a little too perfect. I approach the woman sharing the story, and tell her that I don’t believe her, that my intuition senses some sort of deception. Suddenly her eyes get big and black, and the same happens with her teammates, and she stares at me in a very threatening way. She warns me NOT to tell anyone about my feelings.

Then I wake up.

The podcast is still playing on my laptop, and I was surprised that so little time had passed given the length and complexity of my dream. I was probably asleep for less than a half hour

The dream was so intensely vivid that I did something that surprises me as I type this. I got out of bed, went downstairs and found a little digital voice recorder, and carried it back up to my bed. I lay there, under the covers, and recorded the dream as best as I could. (audio from this recording posted here)

After, describing the weird narrative, I stopped the recorder and turned off the light. In the dark I saw a small blue orb, about the size of a grapefruit floating, centered in the ceiling above my bed. I could see it for probably less than 20 seconds, and then it was gone. It disappeared quickly and smoothly. Right after it faded away, I rolled over and promptly went to sleep, an unusual reaction to seeing something so strange.

The orb was a soft focus sphere, not the flat looking image that show up on digital flash photos. It was three dimensional and glowing softly. It gave off light, but it didn't seem to light up the ceiling the way, say, a glow stick might. Could it have been something in my retina from my bedside light? Maybe, but I've slept in that room for over 16 years and I've never seen anything like that before. In the follow up to the experience, I tried to recreate the experience by looking into lights in the room (including the tiny red light on the voice recorder) and then shut the lights off, these attempts didn't come close to what I saw that night. 

This orb image is from a the homepage of a person I met during the final hours of the Laughlin conference. Her name is Jill and she is a channel. I found it on her web page, minutes after posting this essay.

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NOTE: This post has an accompanying audio file, found HERE.

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the highway to Sedona (Laughlin 3)

A map showing the route between Flagstaff and Sedona There are meadows shown on the satellite image, and these are less than 2 miles from the forested area that reminded me of the dream. Click on this map for a HI-rez image.

I picked up a friend from Germany at the Las Vegas airport on the afternoon of Thursday February 18th. While still in the airport I told her about my weirdly colorful dream. We were planning to visit Sedona Arizona for two nights before heading to the conference in Laughlin Nevada. The reason we are going to Sedona is because Natascha had a channelled reading from Anya Briggs, where she was told (quite directly) that she MUST visit Sedona Arizona.

To get to Sedona, we got off of I-17 and onto US Highway 89 just a few miles south of Flagstaff.

It was a delight to be off the busy interstate and onto the tiny mountain road. At a certain point I needed to stop the car, and get out to pee. I pulled over in a pretty stand of trees, got out, walked into the forest a few steps and did my business. As I stood there, I was immediately aware that this scene almost exactly matched the forest in my intensely vivid dream from two nights before.

When I got back in the car, I told Natascha that this spot was eerily similar to the forest in my dream.

We arrive in Sedona a little while later, and we didn’t keep track of the time. But, everything seemed perfectly normal.

Now, lets jump forward to the Laughlin conference. I had the chance to visit with “John Smith” (a pseudonym), who I’ve met a few times now at two different conferences. This guy has quite a rich set of experiences. I tell him about my dream in the forest, and the eerie section of woods on the way to Sedona.

Then John tells me a very strange story.

He was with his wife staying at a hotel in Flagstaff, and at 9 o’clock at night, his wife says that they need to drive to Sedona, right now. John recognizes how odd this is, and says he has a bad feeling about it. But she is absolutely adamant that they leave right at that moment. So, they get in the car and begin the drive. They drive south on I-17 and then turn onto US Highway 89 just a few miles outside of Flagstaff. They get to an open meadow, and then his wife says, “I don’t think we need to go to Sedona, let’s turn around.” So, they turn the car around and head back to their hotel in Flagstaff. John notes that there is about 15 minutes of missing time.

In the months that follow, both of them are, for reasons unknown, increasing agitated about that night. Later, John gets hypnotically regressed and a set of memories emerge where he pulls off the road and parks next to that open meadow, and his wife is somehow pulled up out of her car seat and through the roof of their rental car (he even explained that she rose up through her seat belt). John sat in the drivers seat for about 15 minutes, and then she was returned. They began driving and his wife said, “I don’t think we need to go to Sedona, let’s turn around.”

John and I talked about that stretch of highway 89. He explained where that meadow was in comparison to the spot in the forest where Natascha and I got out of the car. I don’t know exactly, but the two spots are probably no more than 3 miles apart.

When I shared this story with Natascha, she pointed out that in both situations it was the woman who insisted that they go to Sedona.

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Text and Photo added on March 6th 2010:

John Smith sent me a series of photos showing the meadow along Arizona Highway 89a. After the event he went back during daylight and found the location and took photos. Here is one of them. Note the forest in the background, it has a similar look to my dream memory, thin pine trees without branches down low. This meadow is located on the map above.

meeting Joseph Mark (Laughlin 2)

Joseph Mark Cohen and myself during a rare rainy day in Sedona Arizona. Photo by Natascha.

While in Sedona on Friday February 19th, Natascha and I went for coffee in the morning. We were in a typical american strip mall, with (what looked like) a nice health food store next to the coffee shop. Natascha strikes up a conversation with a rather eccentric looking gentleman named Joseph Mark Cohen. He was looking for a ride to the Laughlin UFO conference, and we told him that he could join us because we were planning on leaving later in the day.

It turns out that Joseph is a guide in the Sedona area, and we had a wonderful day as he showed us around. This day could be it’s own blog posting, but for now all I can say is that the silly caricature that I have of Sedona is real. (and I say that in a nice way!) Joseph is a quite the mystical fellow, and he does astrological readings and he had just completed an oracle deck of cards with high quality crop circle images.

We ate dinner together at an absolutely amazing vegetarian restaurant called The ChocolaTree. While at the table, Joseph did some oracle readings using his deck. Joseph seemed well versed in mythology, hebrew mysticism, astronomy and number codes. It was delightful and interesting.

While at the table I drew the curious puzzle piece from my dream on a napkin. I asked Joseph if he knew anything about this shape. He looked at the funny “W” shape, and he turned the napkin upside down and said, “Well, it’s my initials!”

True enough, when the image was upside down, it made a very tidy JM.

This image was drawn the morning right after I woke up from my vivid dream. The top sketch is the way I saw it in the dream, and the one below is the same thing, but turned upside-down.

Mike Lewis sends me a smile (Laughlin 1)

On Wednesday February 17th, I started my drive to the Laughlin Nevada UFO conference. On that same day I received this on my Facebook page from Mike Lewis (a pseudonym). It's a lighthearted "smile" showing a winking cat. If you have followed this blog at all, this is a little bit curious, it seems like Mike Lewis is winking at me from afar.

I'll also add that the only time Mike Lewis and I had any kind of a "chat" on Facebook, was the evening of Wednesday October 14th, right before I began my drive to the Dreamland UFO conference in California.

It's tricky to read too much into this, but it is interesting, at least to me. It's strange how facebook seems to play a role in this ongoing weirdness.

Also, I used photoshop to alter the name and image in the above photo of my computer screen.

one year old

As of today, this blog is one year old.

Something has happened to me since the first post. I’ve changed.

This is the 82nd post. The first posting went up on March 3rd 2009, and it was a short essay about my cat and how she plays with string, and the very first comment was from Mac Tonnies.

A lot has happened in the last year. Before writing this I carefully (and slowly) scrolled through the entire archive, something I’ve never done before. I have been extremely careful not to add anything extraneous or off-topic to this site (except this). Believe me, I’ve found plenty of really interesting on-line articles that I could have shared, but I chose not to. This blog, whatever it is, seems to want to remain focused on my own experiences, and I really care about the content. True to the title of the blog, something seems hidden from me, but I can’t quite define what that might be.

When I re-read my earlier writings, it’s obvious I was awash in an anxious set of emotions. It’s not easy looking at some of that stuff, but that urgency has subsided, but it hasn’t entirely disappeared. That earnest feeling has it’s own energy and it pushes me forward, like a detective in a mystery story.

I’ve met some wonderful new friends as a result of this blog, and that means more to me than I could possibly share in just words. My email in-box is now loaded with correspondence from people directly affected by the same curious affliction that seems to be interacting with me. This communication is profoundly rewarding. I’m also receiving emails from people who are eager to share their stories (often eerily similar), they are reaching out to me and it feels good that maybe my writing can be helpful to them.

There is a posting from March 25th of last year titled: Deep Feelings and Blogging. This was a good one for me to re-read on this baby’s first birthday.

I have no idea where this strange path may lead. Maybe all this weirdness will come to a screeching halt, but I don’t think so. All I can say for sure is that I will be as honest as I can be as I proceed forward.

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report from Laughlin Nevada

Presently, I'm sitting in the convention hall at the annual UFO conference. A mixed bag of very interesting and the absurd. More to come - soon.

I plan on doing a series of short (easy to digest) posts, rather than one monster report.

UFO Disclosure Implications

The intricacies of a quandary in under four minutes.

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Mac's voice, talking about cats

Mac Tonnies (in William Burroughs attire) with a cute toy cat. The blurry distortion in the photo is undoubtedly due to electro-magnetic interference from a yet unknown parallel dimension.

Mac Tonnies, ever the technologist, uses a laser beam while I use a string. We are both metaphorically exploring the UFO phenomenon and it's relationship to humanity.

Here is a short audio posting where you can compare and contrast Mac's wise insights, and my stilted ponderings about cats. This is a companion to previous posting titled Cats, Strings & Laser Pointers.

one-click audio download HERE

11 minutes

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audio with Mac's voice / 11 minutes

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Huge thanks to Greg Bishop & Radio Mysterioso for the audio clip from an wonderful interview with Mac earlier this year.

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My Pal Mac Tonnies

In his element.

Just a few days ago, I wrote an email to a friend about Mac Tonnies' final book. I typed out the word posthumous, and I was struck by how much it looks like the title Posthuman Blues, the name of Mac's blog. My mind can get trapped in an unhealthy compulsion of seeing little coincidences, and thinking there is a deeper meaning.

This is a long posting. It is a rambling bunch of self examination about the loss of my friend. I wrote it in a sort of flurry, it is a string of details I needed to get written down. I may remove it from the blog at some point, but it feels honest.

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I was driving back from a conference in California (Whitley Strieber’s DREAMLAND event in Joshua Tree) in late October of last year. This was a decidedly heady time, with a lot of intense stuff invading my life.

I stopped in Moab Utah to visit a friend, and I camped in the desert at the edge of town. The next morning I had a smoothie at a small breakfast shop, and for some reason I requested bee pollen as an extra, I had never had it before and I figured I would give it a try. Within minutes of finishing the drink, I had a very distressing allergic reaction. My face turned red, my lips puffed up, I was itchy all over and I barfed in the bathroom of the restaurant.

At no point did I feel my airway closing up, but believe me, I was one step away from driving to the emergency room. I took a benedryl, and waited for it to pass.

Right in the throws of this anaphylactic reaction, I went to visit a UFO researcher named Elaine Douglas. We had met once before, and I had spoken to her a few times on the phone. She and I talked about the research she was doing, and my ongoing weirdness. While sitting at her kitchen table, I felt progressively better. After about an hour, I felt perfectly normal. I thought I would just stop by for a short visit, but we ended up talking for multiple hours, and it was late in the afternoon when I finally said goodbye.

At that point I had a long drive in front of me, from Utah to my home in Idaho. I went into a little cafe on the main street to fill up on coffee. I also checked my email on my laptop. It was right then I found out that Mac had died. I was absolutely shocked, and I sat in the back corner of the cafe and cried.

I had talked with Mac just a week or so earlier, it was a typical conversation for us; deep, wide ranging, lots of laughs and it spiraled on late into the night.

I had simply assumed that one day I would sit in a coffee shop with Mac, we would drink espresso and talk, just like we always had. And now he was gone.

Mac had a reverence for espresso, he wrote about it often and lovingly. I went up to the counter, and ordered a double latte short, and I savored every beautiful drop.

At that point nobody really knew how he died, but from what I could glean on-line, it was assumed to be a heart issue. Earlier in the year Mac had told me of an experience where he went to the hospital to get some sort of heart exam. This was after he had a fainting event at work. He was calm and dismissive about the whole thing, and he treated it as a nuisance.

I got in my car and started driving north. The emotional numbness was oppressive and scary. I chose to travel on the two-lane desert highways, avoiding the inhumanity of I-15 and Salt Lake City.

The drive was astounding beautiful. I had a series of podcast interviews with Mac all loaded up on my iPod, and I listened to them as the sun set in a glorious display of reds and orange. The route I took home was empty and desolate, and I would go for as long as an hour without seeing another car.

One of the downloads was a the three hour long Coast to Coast interview. This was particularly beautiful and bittersweet. You could hear George Noory’s voice that he was perfectly charmed and engaged talking with Mac. As silly as this sounds, you could sense his mind expanding trying to keep up with Mac’s big ideas.

During this time, alone in my car, listening to Mac’s calm and wise voice, my chest began to ache. Something was wrong, I was feeling sharp pains right behind my ribs. I have a minimal amount of first aid training, and the symptoms of cardiac arrest are severe “crushing” pain. That wasn’t what I was feeling, it was presenting as something less intense, but it was real nonetheless. I pulled into a gas station, bought an aspirin in a little foil packet, I swallowed it and hoped this wasn’t the big one.

The pain in my chest seemed related to the allergic reaction from that morning, but at the same time, it wasn’t lost on me that it could be some sort of subconscious sympathetic reaction to Mac’s death.

I got back in my car and drove off into the dark and lonely night. When I had listened to all the audio podcasts of Mac’s interviews, I started over and listened to them again.

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It the weeks that followed, there was a lot of talk about the status of his final book. The story came out that there was a printed copy of the manuscript found on his desk. This document had final edits in Mac’s handwriting in the margins.

During my correspondence with Mac throughout 2009, I made it clear that I was eager to do a few illustrations for his book. Mac seemed delighted by my offer. I’ll add that he had been super supportive of my artwork since I started posting some of my drawings on-line. He would consistently comment on the cartoons, and I deeply appreciated his observant compliments.

I contacted Mac’s publisher to ask about the illustrations, it seemed that Mac had mentioned me and my offer to draw for the book, and I set about doing some initial sketches. Having a small role in Mac's book was a profound honor, and I took the responsibility seriously.

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On December first 2009, I got the text of Mac's CRYPTOTERRASTRIALS book sent to me in a word document. I took it to the local copy shop, and they printed it up for me. I punched holes in the paper and put it in a 3-ring binder. At first I was a little intimidated to read it. There was something sacred, or maybe daunting about it.

A few days later I realized I needed to sit down and start reading.

I went through a sort of formal process. I made a cup of tea, got my reading glasses, turned the lamp on and sat on the couch. The binder was on the coffee table facing me. I opened the binder, turned to the very first page and just as I began looking at the opening words - I head a loud "click" from right next to me.

I looked over and my CD player had spontaneously ejected the cassette. It had done this all by itself.

That CD player is well over a decade old, and in all those years this has never happened. It seemed extremely odd. And I'm not kidding, it happened at the EXACT second that I read the very first words.

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When I finally sat down at the desk to start the drawings, I was suddenly hit with that same dull but very real chest pain, just like like the night driving alone in Utah. It was centered behind my ribs and it was very difficult to ignore. It wasn’t the acute crushing pain described by cardiac arrest patients, but it was nonetheless, very real. I managed to dismiss it for over a week, hoping it would go away, but it didn’t, it stayed exactly the same. The only way I can describe it is to say it felt creepy.

I've never had chest pain before, and it happens twice, and both times it was closely associated with Mac. One morning I woke up and the finger tips in my left hand were going numb, and I had a very distressing sensation in my left armpit.

I went to my doctor that day. My pulse and blood pressure were perfect, and I tried to describe the symptoms to the doctor. He listened carefully and was genuinely perplexed, I wasn’t showing any overt symptoms of cardiac trouble.

I also said that I thought it might be psychosomatic, because it so closely matched the death of a young friend, Mac, from heart related issues. He patiently listened, and then he said, “Let’s have a listen.”

I got up on the exam table and he listened to my heart with his stethoscope. I watched as he listened, and after a moment I could see his face make a sort of AH-HA expression. He said he heard a very specific rubbing noise that indicated pericarditis. This is a swelling and irritation of the pericardium, which is the sac that surrounds your heart. (more weirdness HERE)

He said that the treatment for pericarditis is a daily regime of anti-inflammatory medication and if I respond well, there is nothing to worry about. I started taking Aleve, and within 24 hours, all the pain was gone.

The numbness in the fingertips of my left hand continued, and it’s numb right now, as I type this. Presently it's very minor, and neither me or my doctor is concerned. It is presenting like a pinched nerve in my shoulder.

Black and white chapter header for Mac's book, with lots of scratchy "R.Crumb" shadowing.

The process of doing the drawings was deeply emotional. It was, in some way, a very real form of grieving. I simply HAD to immerse myself into the creative process in a way that I usually avoid.

I over worked the drawings. I spent to much time on them, I used too many tiny lines, I got swallowed up in the minute details. I cared about these drawings in a way that felt important to me.

During our last phone call Mac told me about R.Crumb’s latest book. It was a literal interpretation of The Book of Genesis. I hadn’t heard about it, and Mac delighted in describing the funny details, he reveled in the lurid begatting and the violent smiting.

On Thursday October 22nd I saw the book in a bookstore on a tiny Main Street in the middle of Utah. I bought it immediately and I sent my last email to Mac using the wireless in the book store. I later realized later this was the day that they found Mac’s body in his apartment in Kansas City.

Mac and I were both huge fans of R.Crumb, and I made sure to embrace that inky scratchy look as I worked on the illustrations.

Here’s how he introduced me on his Posthuman Blues site: Blog of the day: Little Boing Marks by friend and ufological co-conspirator Mike Clelland. Mike's drawings are delightful: R. Crumb meets Dr. Seuss.

The inspiration for the style and format of the illustrations for Mac’s book was lifted directly from an R.Crumb illustrated edition of THE MONKEY WRENCH GANG. Curiously, I bought this hard to find book a decade earlier, on that same Main Street in Utah.

* * *

I suffer from clinical depression, something that seems all to common with creative types like me. Throughout my life I go through cycles where I walk away from the desk and ignore my skills as an illustrator. 2009 was probably the emptiest time of my life, where I actively rejected drawing, I felt terribly barren and uninspired.

Mac’s book forced me to break through that stuck feeling. The job of sitting at my desk, with pens and pencils and ink felt wonderful. I enjoyed the act of putting little black lines on a clean white sheet of paper. Something that I thought I had lost was back again.

I feel fantastically blessed that I knew Mac Tonnies. The world needed his amazing mind, and his eagerness to look deep into the unknown. It is a profound honor to know he was my friend.

cats, strings and laser pointers

MacTonnies' cat Ebe, an acronym for Extraterrestrial Biological Entity.

The very first posting on this blog (March 3rd 2009) was a short little essay that I had written up years before titled CAT & STRING. It was a nice little metaphor that attempted to articulate some of the weirdness of the UFO mystery, at least the way I see it.

The opening words of Mac Tonnies posthumous book is a short piece about his cats and a laser pointer. It was originally posted as an essay on his blog, Posthuman Blues.

I strongly encourage you to read BOTH essays before you proceed any further. They are linked HERE and HERE. 


These two essays are eerily similar. If you look at the comment’s below my initial posting, you’ll see that Mac said: “Have you read my essay about cats and laser pointers? We're on the same page!”

That was the very first comment I received on this blog, on the very first posting, on the very same day as the blog went up.

Mac's other (very cute) cat, Spook.

My essay was written sometime in November 2006, two months after Mac wrote his. I remember the morning I wrote it. I sat at my computer, and drank a second cup of coffee, and it simply gushed out of me in a caffeine induced flurry, I'm not kidding, it wrote itself. The text was short and tidy, and it seemed to express exactly the mysterious puzzle that plagued me.

The first thing I did, that same morning, was post this essay on Whitley Strieber’s UNKNOWNCOUNTRY message board. I have since tried to find it, but I can’t seem to dig deep enough. If it’s still there, I could figure out the exact date I wrote the thing.

The first time I ever heard of Mac Tonnies was on a really great Binnall of America interview, dated March 10th 2007 (if you haven’t heard this, it’s amazing!). This was seven months after Mac wrote his Cat & Laser Pointer essay, and five months after I wrote my Cat & String version.

I feel confident in saying that I never read Mac’s essay before writing mine.

The similarities are obvious, we are, quite literally, expressing the very same metaphoric details. It’s very funny that Mac, the self-proclaimed post-human technologist uses a laser pointer, as opposed to me, the self-proclaimed thrifty minimalist with a piece of string. Just so y’know, I am a weirdo zealot about the mystical benefits of ultra-light camping.

After listening to the (over three hour) interview with Tim Binnall, I was simply thunderstruck by the voice and ideas of Mac. It was without hesitation that I searched him out. I simply looked up his name and Missouri and called him on the phone. At the time I was involved in a documentary, and I thought he needed to be involved, and the initial phone call was to ask for an interview, but deep down - I just wanted to talk to the guy.

Among all his other gifts, Mac Tonnies was a beautiful conversationalist. We got along splendidly, and from that first phone call to his his death, we would talk on the phone often, and we would email incessantly.

During our initial correspondence, I sent Mac an email with my Cat & String essay. He replied (almost instantly, as was his nature) that he had written something similar, but with a laser pointer. I no longer have a copy of that email, but it must have been some time after March of 2007.

Mac read his Cat & Laser Pointer essay on an audio interview with Greg Bishop on Radio Mysterioso on July 27th of 2009. I am not sure that’s when I first heard it (maybe), but I later found it on his blog. This obviously struck me as very odd.

  Short audio recording of BOTH of us reading our essays linked HERE  

approx. 11 minutes long

My very playful cat, Spazzy.

Just a few days later, Mac and I had some back and forth emails about that little story.

On July 29th, I asked: When did you write that Cat & Laser Pointer essay? Do you have the date? I'm curious...

Mac replied: I wrote the cat/laser piece a year or so ago -- before your cat/string piece, in case you were wondering. I'm pretty sure I wrote mine in late '06, but I'll double-check. It would be weird if we wrote our essays at the same time!

And...

A few days later Mac emailed me: I found it, and it's dated! I just searched my blog and found mine (Sep, 2006)

I can’t even begin to untangle what, if anything, all of this may mean. Mac said what I was thinking: “It would be weird if we wrote our essays at the same time!” I did a little digging, and we wrote them independently, less than two months apart. If nothing else, I have to agree, it is weird.

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It took me a while of digging, but I found the date I wrote my version on the original document, noted here.

My essay Cat and String written:

November 25, 2006

Mac's essay Cat and Laser pointer published on Post-Human Blues:
September 29, 2006

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Click HERE to see a very sweet little video of Mac's two cats, complete with endearing baby talk voice-over from Mac himself. Please know, this short clip made me cry.

And more images of Mac's cats HERE.

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Also, I made sure to include two cats in the illustration in the previous post below.

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Audio essay with Mac's voice, dated Feb 11th 2010

CLICK HERE

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The above is a cartoon posted by Robbie Graham

on his Facebook page on Janurary 28th 2015.

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illustrations for Mac Tonnies

Click on these images for a HI-rez view.

I was enormously fortunate to play a small role in the final book from my friend Mac Tonnies. This was a truly a powerful and bittersweet experience, forcing me to reflect on what it means to be human. I did a series of eleven illustrations, simple black & white chapter openers. As indulgent as it sounds, I am convince that Mac was in the room with me during my time at the desk with my pens.

There is a lot more to this story, and much of it is emotional and challenging. It was a very confusing way to grieve the loss of a friend. I will write more soon - when I can better articulate my mixed-up sentiments.
Anomalist books has a page up to promote Mac's book, THE CRYPTOTERRESTRIALS, this is an extremely important work by one of our great thinkers.

conversation with Anne Strieber

There is a new audio interview on Whitley Strieber's DREAMLAND (with me), it's posted in the subscriber's section, dated 1/30/2010. I talk with Anne Strieber, Whitley's wife, for about 40 minutes.

I have been going to UFO conferences over the last few years, and I had the chance to talk with Anne at an event in Joshua Tree California in October of last year. We sat together for a short time, and I shared some of my experiences, and she had a lot of insights.

After the publication of COMMUNION in 1987, the Strieber's received over half a million letters where people would share their experiences. Anne claims to have read thru all of them, and in doing so, she has become a sort of data base for the extremely bizarre details that get reported by witnesses.

You will need to be a member of the DREAMLAND site to access this audio interview.

Here's an excerpt of what Anne wrote about the interview:

Subscriber Special: A Subscriber Close-Encounter Witness Tells His Story

... Anne Strieber talks with close encounter witness "Mike" about his current and ongoing encounter experiences. As our visitors focus more and more on people who are taking an active interest in them, the close encounter experience is changing. No longer does it involve only sudden appearances in the middle of the night to totally unprepared people, it also involves ongoing relationships with people who have been having encounters, often for years.
These people offer a whole new narrative of contact, and represent the first ongoing experience human beings have had with entities of unknown origin that is not being turned into mythology and superstition. Listen as Mike tells you of his life and his experiences in a calm and straightforward manner. He discusses synchronicities, missing time, seeing visitors as a child, and his personal struggle to get past denial and fear and make his encounters a part of his life of value to him, not simply something to be endured in fear and confusion.

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Also, early in the interview I mistakenly say 1973 when talking about the Orange Flash event, I should have said 1974.

Shortly there after I say that I received an email from Whitley where he says he is following my blog, I made a mistake, that email was in reference to following my twitter account. He did send me a note about my blog, but it was a different day. Sorry about that, I was nervous at the beginning, and I made some mistakes.
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