Ida Kannenberg, a delightful Contactee

The UFO community has lost one of its true jewels. Ida Kannenberg died on May 17th of this year, she was 95 years old.

Of all the authors that have inspired me, Ida was the one who I went back to over and over as a way to hold onto some sort of framework for this phenomenon. She told of life events that included UFOs, visitations from human entities, telepathic messages and channeling.

She lobbied that much of what might be perceived as literal was in fact metaphoric and they mythic. She wrote (or channeled) about the profound difference between spirit and the soul, something that went beyond what we might assume a UFO contactee wouldn't try to tackle. Plus - She was funny and sassy, and it makes her books perfectly delightful.

She was close friends with Leo Sprinkle, and he gave me her email address an encouraged me to reach out to her. I corresponded briefly during the winter of 2006. She was very supportive, as well as sharing stories about her cats:

"Princess Fiona gets into every nook and cranny of the house and into mischief at the same time. Lord Spike is too fat to get into the same corners. Old cranky Tibbetts just sleeps in the guest bed and sulks. Hope you are having a good Christmas time and will keep in touch through the new year. --- Ida Kannenberg"

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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cat and string

The term UFO implies a lot, and by definition, it’s unknown. How can I wrap my head around something so utterly strange, something that, no matter how you look at it, remains unknowable.

Here’s something that helps me. I use a piece of string when I play with my cat, I stand in the kitchen and wiggle it around, and my cat just goes nuts. I never really let her “catch” the string, I try and keep it just an inch in front of her. Sometimes she’ll manage to get it in her claws, but I’ll snap it away and out of reach.

Does she think the string is alive?

I can’t help but think this is exactly what’s happening to us. To me, this phenomenon is similar to that piece of string. It wiggles out in front of us, but it’s simply impossible to catch. Does my cat have a way to perceive the string as a string? Maybe, but she doesn’t seem to be that insightful, her reality is that it’s a wonderful and special living thing that magically amplifies her very being. The string-game can get so overwhelming that she gets positively unhinged with excitement.

And the experiences described by the abductees may be impossible to accurately perceive. This bizarre experience is, like the string, capable of overwhelming and unhinging.

Do we say that the UFO occupants are visiting us in the same way my cat would say the string is alive?

One thing that draws me to this subject is that, at it’s core, it’s just such a intensely wonderful and scary story. I used to love spooky campfire stories as a child. Now as an adult, I still crave that mysterious thrill, and the UFO phenomenon fulfills that need. Is there something universal about our need for a scary story? Do “they” know about that need, and frame the experience in a way that will satisfy us on some deep level.

These stories are so elusive. We want to be able to “kick the tires” of this experience. But it just doesn’t happen. As soon as we get close to a clue or answer, it has a way of skittering away, just out of our reach, like the string on my kitchen floor.

My cat needs to play the string game to truly fulfill her cat-ness. Do we need the experience of trying to confront an elusive mystery, to truly fulfill our human-ness? A pragmatic scientist would say no, but what would a primitive shaman say?

My cat and I are connected to each other when we play the string game. So then, what are we connected to?

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This essay (above) was my VERY first posting on this blog. Look below, you'll see that Mac Tonnies left the VERY first comment. We have both written essays about cats as a metaphor for humanities interaction with UFOs.

These essays were the genesis for two more postings, HERE and HERE.

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AUDIO essay with Mac and me reading similar essays:

CLICK HERE

Posted Feb 11th 2010

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