Cargo Cults: Blessing from the Skies

Cargo Cults: Blessing from the Skies

Original Religion

 

John Frum and the Cargo Cults

by Gerry Matlack

Every year on February 15th, natives of Tanna Island in the Republic of Vanuatu hold a grand celebration in honor of an imaginary man named John Frum. Villagers clothe themselves in homemade US Army britches, paint “USA” on their bare chests and backs, and run a replica of Old Glory up the flagpole alongside the Marine Corps Emblem and the state flag of Georgia. Barefoot soldiers then march in perfect step in the shadow of Yasur, the island’s active volcano, with red-tipped bamboo “rifles” slung over their shoulders. February 15th is known as John Frum day on Tanna Island, and these activities are the islanders’ holiest religious service.

The Vanuatu island group lies northeast of Australia and southeast of Malaysia and the Philippines. Prior to contact with Europeans, the people who lived there were primitive tribal societies. Many of history’s stereotypes and legends regarding island cannibals originated from these societies; slain enemies and the occasional missionary were eaten, sometimes in the hopes of gaining magical powers, and other times due to food shortages. 

Eventually the New Hebrides islands (as they were then called) were colonized and placed under joint British and French rule. Christian missionaries formed a makeshift government and court system which punished islanders for following many of their long-held customs, such as dancing, swearing, adultery, and polygamy. The colonizers also forbade working and amusement on Sundays. The islanders lived under this oppression for thirty years before a fellow native rallied the people and promised an age of abundance to any who would reject the European ways. He went by the alias “John Frum,” a name possibly derived from the phrase “John from Jesus Christ”– namely John the Baptist. Many islanders joined him, and the cult moved inland to escape the missionaries and return to their old traditions.

One day in the early 1940s, the relatively isolated group of islands was descended upon by hundreds of thousands of American soldiers who arrived by sea and by air. The world was at war, and America had plans to build bases on the Pacific islands. The newcomers recruited the locals’ assistance in constructing hospitals, airstrips, jetties, roads, bridges, and corrugated-steel Quonset huts, all of which were strange and wondrous to the natives. But it was the prodigious amounts of war materiel that were airdropped for the US bases that drastically changed the lifestyle of the islanders. They observed as aircraft descended from the sky and delivered crates full of clothing, tents, weapons, tools, canned foods, and other goods to the island’s new residents, a diversity of riches the likes of which the islanders had never seen. The natives learned that this bounty from the sky was known to the American servicemen as “cargo.”

These new occupiers proved to be far better guests than the British missionaries had been. The islanders were further astonished at the sight of black GIs among the ranks, enjoying all the benefits of cargo that the white soldiers enjoyed– something that the black islanders had been denied with rare exception. The islanders believed that their own dead ancestors continued to influence the communities of the living, and that their ancestors would one day come back to life and distribute to them unimaginable wealth. Therefore they reasoned that the white people must have had connections to their own ancestors, who would logically be the only ones powerful enough to rain down such wondrous riches.

It was during the war that the John Frum legend changed, recasting the religious icon as a black American infantryman. The black GIs were believed to have been John Frum’s own detachment of the US Army, or perhaps the grown children of islanders believed to have been kidnapped by plantation owners long ago. It was said that John Frum lived inside the island’s volcano, called “Yasur”– the native word for “God.”

When the war ended several years later, the Americans departed as suddenly as they had arrived. Military bases were abandoned, and the steady flow of cargo which had altered the islanders’ lives completely dried up. The men and women of Tanna Island had grown to enjoy the radios, trucks, boats, watches, iceboxes, medicine, Coca-Cola, canned meat, and candy, so they set into motion a plan to bring back the cargo. They had surreptitiously learned the secrets of summoning the cargo by observing the practices of the American airmen, sailors and soldiers.

The islanders set to work clearing their own kind of landing strips, and they erected their own control towers strung with rope and bamboo aerials. They carved wooden radio headsets with bamboo antennae, and even the occasional wooden air-traffic controller. Day after day, men from the village sat in their towers wearing their replica headsets as others stood on the runways and waved the landing signals to attract cargo-bringing airplanes from the empty sky. More towers were constructed, these with tin cans strung on wires to imitate radio stations so John Frum could communicate with his people. Piers were also erected in an effort to attract ships laden with cargo, and the Red Cross emblem seen on wartime ambulances was taken as the symbol of the resurging religion. Today villages surrounding Yasur Volcano are dotted with little red crosses surrounded by picket fences, silently testifying to the islander’s faith.

The priests and prophets of the John Frum cult, called “messengers,” foretold the return of planes and ships bearing cargo for the people of Tanna escorted by John Frum himself. The movement declared that in addition to returning to their “kastom” [custom] ways, money was to be thrown away, gardens be left untended, and pigs killed since all material wealth will be provided in the end by John Frum. Their god has yet to emerge from his home inside the volcano to bring the promised riches, and at least one visitor’s guide offers this advice: “If you question a local about their beliefs, they will most likely reply that you have been waiting for your messiah to return for over 2000 years – while they have been waiting for only 70.”

John Frum Day parade

 
Yasur the volcano

Despite gaining their independence and becoming familiar with the workings of the world around them, new beliefs arise on the island regularly. A visit to the village of Yaohnanen in 1974 by Prince Phillip resulted in the formation of a Prince Phillip cult. Its followers believe that Phillip originally came from Tanna, albeit in a different form, and that he will eventually return to rule over them. A recent development is the appearance of the Prophet Fred, an actual person who claims to have raised his wife from the dead in early 2006. He preaches a turn to more mainstream Christianity, and his followers have had violent clashes with those of John Frum.

Vanuatu is not the earliest and far from the only place in Melanesia where cargo cults have existed. The origin of the earliest cargo cults in general can be traced back to 1871, when the Russian explorer Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay landed in Papua New Guinea bearing gifts of goods such as steel axe heads and bolts of cloth. Inevitably, missionaries soon arrived and began distributing goods. Initially all efforts to convert the natives proved useless, but one day the natives suddenly started converting in droves. The men and women of the island had theorized that learning the rituals of the Europeans would allow them to gain the secrets of cargo.

The religions introduced by missionaries were completely inconsistent with islanders’ long-held beliefs, yet the natives could not deny the call of the cargo. The people therefore attempted to reconcile their existing beliefs with the missionaries’ teachings, a practice which led to some strange interpretations. In New Guinea, one resulting version of Christianity described a god named Anus who delivered cargo of canned meat, steel tools, rice, and matches to Adam and Eve. When they discovered sex, Anus ejected them from Eden and struck them with a flood.

On the Island of New Hanover in the Bismarck Archipelago, another cargo cult arose in 1968 claiming that the true secret of cargo was known to only one man: President Lyndon Johnson. The natives of this island revolted against their Australian rulers, saved up $75,000, and sent a letter to Johnson offering to buy him and make him King of New Hanover. Strangely enough, he didn’t accept.

Renowned physicist Richard Feynman coined the phrase “cargo cult science” based on such cults. The term draws a metaphor for research which is polluted by the mind’s tendency to cherry-pick evidence that supports the desired outcome. Though it is tempting to look down on these islanders for their misguided assumptions, they are simply an extreme example of this very human bias. For them it was easier to believe that the control towers, headsets, and runways were the cause of the cargo-carrying airplanes rather than an effect, so they closed their minds to alternative explanations.

Some of these cargo cults continue to operate today, such as the parade-marching pseudo-marines of Vanuatu. So far no black US infantryman have crawled from the volcano to deliver the islanders’ salvation, but every year they confidently hoist their flags and don their uniforms, so they’ll be ready when that glorious day finally arrives. Perhaps one day it will.

From Damn Interesting @ http://www.damninteresting.com/john-frum-and-the-cargo-cults/

  Video @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWjGwBpLZdY

Cargo Cults of Melanesia

 

Throughout Melanesia primitive men awaited a black Messiah who will bring them a largess of "cargo" (European goods). These cults typify the impact of Christendom on premodern society

By Peter M. Worsley  

Editor's Note: This article, published in the May 1959 issue of Scientific American, is a supplement to the 50, 100 & 150 Years Ago column in the May 2009 issue.

Patrols of the Australian Government venturing into the "uncontrolled" central highlands of New Guinea in 1946 found the primitive people there swept up in a wave of religious excitement. Prophecy was being fulfilled: The arrival of the Whites was the sign that the end of the world was at hand. The natives proceeded to butcher all of their pigs-animals that were not only a principal source of subsistence but also, symbols of social status and ritual preeminence in their culture. They killed these valued animals in expression of the belief that after three days of darkness "Great Pigs" would appear from the sky. Food, firewood and other necessities had to be stock-piled to see the people through to the arrival of the Great Pigs. Mock wireless antennae of bamboo and rope had been erected to receive in advance the news of the millennium. Many believed that with the great event they would exchange their black skins for white ones.

This bizarre episode is by no means the single event of its kind in the murky history of the collision of European civilization with the indigenous cultures of the southwest Pacific. For more than 100 years traders and missionaries have been reporting similar disturbances among the peoples of Melanesia, the group of Negro-inhabited islands (including New Guinea, Fiji, the Solomons and the New Hebrides) lying between Australia and the open Pacific Ocean.

Though their technologies were based largely upon stone and wood, these peoples had highIy developed cultures, as measured by the standards of maritime and agricultural ingenuity, the complexity of their varied social organizations and the elaboration of religious belief and ritual. They were nonetheless ill prepared for the shock of the encounter with the Whites, a people so radically different from themselves and so infinitely more powerful. The sudden transition from the society of the ceremonial stone ax to the society of sailing ships and now of airplanes has not been easy to make.

After four centuries of Western expansion [sic], the densely populated central highlands of New Guinea remain one of the few regions where the people still carry on their primitive existence in complete independence of the world outside. Yet as the agents of the Australian Government penetrate into ever more remote mountain valleys, they find these backwaters of antiquity already deeply disturbed by contact with the ideas and artifacts of European civilization. For "cargo" -Pidgin English for trade goods has long flowed along the indigenous channels of communication from the seacoast into the wilderness. With it has traveled the frightening knowledge of the white man's magical power. No small element in the white man's magic is the hopeful message sent abroad by his missionaries: the news that a Messiah will come and that the present order of Creation will end.

The people of the central highlands of New Guinea are only the latest to be gripped in the recurrent religious frenzy of the "cargo cults." However variously embellished with details from native myth and Christian belief, these cults all advance the same central theme: the world is about to end in a terrible cataclysm. Thereafter God, the ancestors or some local culture hero will appear and inaugurate a blissful paradise on earth. Death, old age, illness and evil will be unknown. The riches of the white man will accrue to the Melanesians.

Although the news of such a movement in one area has doubtless often inspired similar movements in other areas, the evidence indicates that these cults have arisen independently in many places as parallel responses to the same enormous social stress and strain. Among the movements best known to students of Melanesia are the "Taro Cult" of New Guinea, the "Vailala Madness" of Papua, the "Naked Cult" of Espiritu Santo, the "John Frum Movement" of the New Hebrides and the "Tuka Cult" of the Fiji Islands.

At times the cults have been so well organized and fanatically persistent that they have brought the work of government to a standstill. The outbreaks have often taken the authorities completely by surprise and have confronted them with mass opposition of an alarming kind. In the 1930s, for example, villagers in the vicinity of Wewak, New Guinea, were stirred by a succession of "Black King" movements. The prophets announced that the Europeans would soon leave the island, abandoning their property to the natives, and urged their followers to cease paying taxes, since the government station was about to disappear into the sea in a great earthquake. To the tiny community of Whites in charge of the region, such talk was dangerous. The authorities jailed four of the prophets and exiled three others. In yet another movement, that sprang up in declared opposition to the local Christian mission, the cult leader took Satan as his god.

Troops on both sides in World War II found their arrival in Melanesia heralded as a sign of the Apocalypse. The G.I.s who landed in the New Hebrides, moving up for the bloody fighting on Guadalcanal, found the natives furiously at work preparing airfields, roads and docks for the magic ships and planes that they believed were coming from "Rusefel" (Roosevelt), the friendly king of America.


 The Japanese also encountered millenarian visionaries during their southward march to Guadalcanal. Indeed, one of the strangest minor military actions of World War II occurred in Dutch New Guinea, when Japanese forces had to be turned against the local Papuan inhabitants of the Geelvink Bay region. The Japanese had at first been received with great joy, not because their "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" propaganda had made any great impact upon the Papuans, but because the natives regarded them as harbingers of the new world that was dawning, the Right of the Dutch having already given the first sign. Mansren, creator of the islands and their peoples, would now return, bringing with him the ancestral dead. All this had been known, the cult leaders declared, to the crafty Dutch, who had torn out the first page of the Bible where these truths were inscribed. When Mansren returned, the existing world order would be entirely overturned. White men would turn black like Papuans, Papuans would become Whites; root crops would grow in trees, and coconuts and fruits would grow like tubers.

Some of the islanders now began to draw together into large "towns"; others took Biblical names such as "Jericho" and "Galilee" for their villages. Soon they adopted military uniforms and began drilling. The Japanese, by now highly unpopular, tried to disarm and disperse the Papuans; resistance inevitably developed. The climax of this tragedy came when several canoe-loads of fanatics sailed out to attack Japanese warships, believing themselves to be invulnerable by virtue of the holy water with which they had sprinkled themselves. But the bullets of the Japanese did not turn to water, and the attackers were mowed down by machine-gun fire.

Behind this incident lay a long history. As long ago as 1857 missionaries in the Geelvink Bay region had made note of the story of Mansren. It is typical of many Melanesian myths that became confounded with Christian doctrine to form the ideological basis of the movements. The legend tells how long ago there lived an old man named Manamakeri ("he who itches"), whose body was covered with sores. Manamakeri was extremely fond of palm wine, and used to climb a huge tree every day to tap the liquid from the flowers. He soon found that someone was getting there before him and removing the liquid. Eventually he trapped the thief, who turned out to be none other than the Morning Star. In return for his freedom, the Star gave the old man a wand that would produce as much fish as he liked, a magic tree and a magic staff. If he drew in the sand and stamped his foot, the drawing would become real.

Manamakeri, aged as he was, now magically impregnated a young maiden; the child of this union was a miracle-child who spoke as soon as he was born. But the maiden's parents were horrified, and banished her, the child and the old man. The trio sailed off in a canoe created by Mansren ("The Lord"), as the old man now became known. On this journey Mansren rejuvenated himself by stepping into a fire and flaking off his scaly skin, which changed into valuables. He then sailed around Geelvink Bay, creating islands where he stopped, and peopling them with the ancestors of the present-day Papuans.

The Mansren myth is plainly a creation myth fu II of symbolic ideas relating to fertility and rebirth. Comparative evidence-especially the shedding of his scaly skin-confirms the suspicion that the old man is, in fact, the Snake in another guise. Psychoanalytic writers argue that the snake occupies such a prominent part in mythology the world over because it stands for the penis, another fertility symbol. This may be so, but its symbolic significance is surely more complex than this. It is the "rebirth" of the hero, whether Mansren or the Snake, that exercises such universal fascination over men's minds.

The 19th-century missionaries thought that the Mansren story would make the introduction of Christianity easier, since the concept of "resurrection," not to mention that of the "virgin birth" and the "second coming," was already there. By 1867, however, the first cult organized around the Mansren legend was reported.

Though such myths were widespread in Melanesia, and may have sparked occasional movements even in the preWhite era, they took on a new significance in the late 19th century, once the European powers had finished parceling out the Melanesian region among themselves. In many coastal areas the long history of "blackbirding"-the seizure of islanders for work on the plantations of Australia and Fiji-had built up a reservoir of hostility to Europeans. In other areas, however, the arrival of the Whites was accepted, even welcomed, for it meant access to bully beef and cigarettes, shirts and paraffin lamps, whisky and bicycles. It also meant access to the knowledge behind these material goods, for the Europeans brought missions and schools as well as cargo.

Practically the only teaching the natives received about European life came from the missions, which emphasized the central significance of religion in European society. The Melanesians already believed that man's activities whether gardening, sailing canoes or bearing children-needed magical assistance. Ritual without human effort was not enough. But neither was human effort on its own. This outlook was reinforced by mission teaching.

The initial enthusiasm for European rule, however, was speedily dispelled. The rapid growth of the plantation economy removed the bulk of the able bodied men from the villages, leaving women, children and old men to carry on as best they could. The splendid vision of the equality of all Christians began to seem a pious deception in face of the realities of the color bar, the multiplicity of rival Christian missions and the open irreligion of many Whites.

For a long time the natives accepted the European mission as the means by which the "cargo" would eventually be made available to them. But they found that acceptance of Christianity did not bring the cargo any nearer. They grew disillusioned. The Astor now began to be put about that it was not the Whites who made the cargo, but the dead ancestors. To people completely ignorant of factory production, this made good sense. White men did not work; they merely wrote secret signs on scraps of paper, for which they were given shiploads of goods. On the other hand, the Melanesians labored week after week for pitiful wages. Plainly the goods must be made for Melanesians somewhere, perhaps in the Land of the Dead. The Whites, who possessed the secret of the cargo, were intercepting it and keeping it from the hands of the islanders, to whom it was really consigned. In the Madang district of New Guinea, after some 40 years' experience of the missions, the natives went in a body one day with a petition demanding that the cargo secret should now be revealed to them, for they had been very patient.


So strong is this belief in the existence of a "secret" that the cargo cults generally contain some ritual in imitation of the mysterious European customs which are held to be the clue to the white man's extraordinary power over goods and men. The believers sit around tables with bottles of flowers in front of them, dressed in European clothes, waiting for the cargo ship or airplane to materialize; other cultists feature magic pieces of paper and cabalistic writing.

Many of them deliberately turn their backs on the past by destroying secret ritual objects, or exposing them to the gaze of uninitiated youths and women, for whom formerly even a glimpse of the sacred objects would have meant the severest penalties, even death. The belief that they were the chosen people is further reinforced by their reading of the Bible, for the lives and customs of the people in the Old Testament resemble their own lives rather than those of the Europeans. In the New Testament they find the Apocalypse, with its prophecies of destruction and resurrection, particularly attractive.

Missions that stress the imminence of the Second Coming, like those of the Seventh Day Adventists, are often accused of stimulating millenarian cults among the islanders. In reality, however, the leanest themselves rework the doctrines the missionaries teach them, selecting from the Bible what they themselves find particularly congenial in it. Such movements have occurred in areas where missions of quite different types have been dominant, from Roman Catholic to Seventh Day Adventist. The reasons for the emergence of these cults, of course, lie far deeper in the life-experience of the people.

The economy of most of the islands is very backward. Native agriculture produces little for the world market, and even the European plantations and mines export only a few primary products and raw materials: copra, rubber, gold. Melanesians are quite unable to understand why copra, for example, fetches 30 pounds sterling per ton one month and but 5 pounds a few months later. With no notion of the workings of world-commodity markets, the natives see only the sudden closing of plantations, reduced wages and unemployment, and are inclined to attribute their insecurity to the whim or evil in the nature of individual planters.

Such shocks have not been confined to the economic order. Governments, too, have come and gone, especially during the two world wars: German, Dutch, British and French administrations melted overnight. Then came the Japanese, only to be ousted in turn largely by the previously unknown Americans. And among these Americans the Melanesians saw Negroes like themselves, living lives of luxury on equal terms with white G.I.s. The sight of these Negroes seemed like a fulfillment of the old prophecies to many cargo cult leaders. Nor must we forget the sheer scale of this invasion. Around a million U. S. troops passed through the Admiralty Islands, completely swamping the inhabitants. It was a world of meaningless and chaotic changes, in which anything was possible.

New ideas were imported and given local twists. Thus in the Loyalty Islands people expected the French Communist Party to bring the millennium. There is no real evidence, however, of any Communist influence in these movements, despite the rather hysterical belief among Solomon Island planters that the name of the local "Masinga Rule" movement was derived from the word "Marxian"! In reality the name comes from a Solomon Island tongue, and means 'brotherhood."

Europeans who have witnessed outbreaks inspired by the cargo cults are usually at a loss to understand what they behold. The islanders throwaway their money, break their most sacred taboos, abandon their gardens and destroy their precious livestock; they indulge in sexual license or, alternatively, rigidly separate men from women in huge communal establishments. Sometimes they spend days sitting gazing at the horizon for a glimpse of the long-awaited ship or airplane; sometimes they dance, pray and sing in mass congregations, becoming possessed and "speaking with tongues ."

Observers have not hesitated to use such words as "madness," "mania," and "irrationality" to characterize the cults. But the cults reflect quite logical and rational attempts to make sense out of a social order that appears senseless and chaotic. Given the ignorance of the Melanesians about the wider European society, its economic organization and its highly developed technology, their reactions form a consistent and understandable pattern. They wrap up all their yearning and hope in an amalgam that combines the best counsel they can find in Christianity and their native belief. If the world is soon to end, gardening or fishing is unnecessary; everything will be provided. If the Melanesians are to be part of a much wider order, the taboos that prescribe their social conduct must now be lifted or broken in a newly prescribed way.

Of course the cargo never comes. The cults nonetheless live on. If the millennium does not arrive on schedule, then perhaps there is some failure in the magic, some error in the ritual. New breakaway groups organize around "purer" faith and ritual. The cult rarely disappears, so long as the social situation which brings it into being persists.

At this point it should be observed that cults of this general kind are not peculiar to Melanesia. Men who feel themselves oppressed and deceived have always been ready to pour their hopes and fears, their aspirations and frustrations, into dreams of a millennium to come or of a golden age to return. All parts of the world have had their counterparts of the cargo cults, from the American Indian ghost dance to the communist-millenarist "reign of the saints" in Munster during the Reformation, from medieval European apocalyptic cults to African "witch-finding" movements and Chinese Buddhist heresies. In some situations men have been content to wait and pray; in others they have sought to hasten the day by using their strong right arms to do the Lord's work. And always the cults serve to bring together scattered groups, notably the peasants and urban plebeians of agrarian societies and the peoples of "stateless" societies where the cult unites separate (and often hostile) villages, clans and tribes into a wider religiopolitical unity.

Once the people begin to develop secular political organizations, however, the sects tend to lose their importance as vehicles of protest. They begin to relegate the Second Coming to the distant future or to the next world. In Melanesia ordinary political bodies, trade unions and native councils are becoming the normal media through which the islanders express their aspirations. In recent years continued economic prosperity and political stability have taken some of the edge off their despair. It now seems unlikely that any major movement along cargo-cult lines will recur in areas where the transition to secular politics has been made, even if the insecurity of prewar times returned. I would predict that the embryonic nationalism represented by cargo cults is likely in future to take forms familiar in the history of other countries that have moved from subsistence agriculture to participation in the world economy.



From Scientific American @ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=1959-cargo-cults-melanesia

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Tracking Progress & Destiny: Life on a Pebble in the Sands of Time

Tracking Progress & Destiny

Life on a Pebble in the Sands of Time

“Dad – isn’t it strange how we’ve come from horses and carts to this in only – what – a century?” Beamish nodded toward the compact notebook computer balanced before him on a battered old wooden chest. Shadowed moonlight poured into the small pentagonal hardwood cabin through the high waving branches of flooded gums while a Greater Barred Frog cried ‘WOP!’ in the creek below.




“Have you ever heard the truism that says, ‘You don’t get steam engines until it’s steam engine time’ ?” I asked in reply. His eyebrow raised, Spock-like, while I continued. “It’s a phrase that can be read in a number of ways…”




Is this jerky upward progression – from a barbaric feudal world run by superstitious racist despots to this modern agglomeration of apparently democratic states – an accidental yet logical outcome of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, as many historians and social scientists aver? Is it a result of Adam Smith’s ‘hidden hand’ enforcing efficiencies in markets and societies through random reactions – statistical survival of the fittest techniques, via mythic Adam and Eve’s infamous proclivity for chaotic and wilful behaviour? 




Or could humankind’s technological progress be fixed to the tracks of a thoroughly planned route, rather than being an ad hoc series of randomly discovered steps in a tangled tango of historical survivors? 




Perceiving reality is like looking through a glass onion. Surface explanations suffice to deflect most people from examining deeper layers of meaning and intent. Yet the very existence of layered shields of misinformation and disinformation indicates that something lies hidden beneath the surface tissues of lies.




I’ll tell you what I told Beamish Boy; none of this extraordinary acceleration is an accident. There are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of by workmanlike minds trapped on workaday treadmills. There are greater aspirations and dangers to be faced if we’re to perceive a truer rendering of our past and present. Modern humankind is a wounded, blinded, crippled species with little idea of our true history, potential and abilities.




Wartime competitiveness is an often cited explanation for the logarithmic advances of the last centuries. This observation casts light on the restraining forces of competing corporations that hold change in check in peaceable times to retain monopoly control over every facet of civilised life- only allowing rapid progress to occur when their own industrial or financial power bases are threatened. But it’s an insufficient explanation for the extraordinary explosion of changes we’ve experienced on planet Earth in recent decades. 




The wartime explanation is indeed apt, in a far less obvious way. There was and is a war in heaven and the events and causes that lie at the roots of our civilisation are beyond the horizon of our mundane perceptions. Human technological progress has been deliberately accelerated and channelled into specific directions for at least three hundred years. 

For millennia the world was throttled by the hands of glorified kings, queens and emperors, who hearkened to notions of divinely exalted bloodlines as justification for their elite positions at the summit of clannish domesticated primate totems. Seeking more power through spending vast sums they didn’t have – yet could procure from thin air with surprising ease – these short sighted rulers relinquished control to the keepers of gold, whose interest was purely interest. 

The last century has seen a maelstrom of shockingly rapid changes; from horses and carts, blackboard and chalk, colonial empires, universal racism, sexism and stultifying religion to this.

Many seekers today believe that money makes the world go round – that financial interests rule the lives of all and that the ultimate puppeteers are banksters who hold membership in an overarching secret society. Yet the entirely imaginary forces of money and monetarism are merely particularly effective tools for controlling the wills and minds of others. The entire economic shebang is just another layer of the glass onion, operated by those whose final shield is Intelligence (of the three lettered kind). Higher consciousness lies at the core, masked by levels of corruption, deception and pretty wallpaper.




Those who believe they control the world and everyone in it are wrong.




The world is run by magic, and the primal magic trick of all is misdirection.








Whether the Earth is the true original home of all humankind or merely a lost colony of infragalactic humans who supplanted indigenous hominids – or both – we are manipulated by forces from beyond the globe of this watery planet. We reside in a cozened culture dish, breeding in the global womb and blessed with the ignorance of our imagined isolation.




Nothing will make sense unless we hearken to what Charles Fort stated almost a century ago; ‘We are property’, or certainly viewed as such by beings who dwell beyond terrestrial ken.




Humankind is a genie that’s already well and truly escaped the space-time Klein bottle. We exist throughout much of the multiverse. This makes most material aspirations utterly pointless – but neither evolution nor volition are done with us yet. We have a long way to go and many petals to unfold.




I’ll not stretch credibility further by pointing out that our solar system seethes with sentient life we cannot or will not recognise, or by stating that much is more advanced than Earthly life, or that some of it is human. I’ll not bend your ear with tales of governments that have outgrown their terrestrial nations or of private consortiums that are already spreading through space and time.




Instead I’ll ask you to look at your life, and see what you do with your time. Are you living now in the immortal present, or working toward a mythic tomorrow? Are you dancing now, or trapped on a treadmill in hopes that something more pleasant and freer will become available at some future time? Are you in control of your mind and emotions or jerking at the strings of seen, unseen and obscene puppeteers and fishers of men?



Examining your true self is the only way to begin to learn what’s really going on. When you can tell the truth bullshit won’t stick to you.




Turn on. Tune in. Opt out in the knowledge that there is something out there – in here – to opt into. There are an infinite number of possible worlds and you get to choose which one you live in, every day. You are an immortal being with extraordinary potential whose destiny is yet uncharted. Abandon all faith in the fantasies of yore and step into a blessedly unknown future. 




The known one sucks bigtime, and the only way out is in.

by R. Ayana

Images – author’s

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SCIENTIST ADMITS TO STUDY OF ROSWELL CRASH DEBRIS

SCIENTIST ADMITS TO STUDY OF ROSWELL CRASH DEBRIS

 (Confirmed by FOIA Document)

By Anthony Bragalia - The UFO Iconoclast(s)

A research study that has recently been obtained through FOIA offers stunning confirmation that Wright-Patterson Air Force base contracted Battelle Memorial Institute to analyze material from a crashed UFO at Roswell in 1947. Remarkably, the co-author of this very metals study is the same scientist who decades ago had confessed that he had examined extraterrestrial metal from a crashed UFO while he was a research scientist at Battelle.

This just-received document also reveals that another one of its metallurgist authors reported directly to a Battelle scientist who was conducting secret UFO studies for the USAF. It appears that the study represents first-ever attempts in creating highly novel and advanced Titanium alloys. Some of these alloys were later associated with the development of "memory metal" of the type reported as crash debris at Roswell.

This 1949 Battelle research study had never before been publicly available until earlier this month. Its release was compelled under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA.) It was sought because references to it had been found as footnotes within later military-sponsored studies on shape-memory alloys such as Nitinol. It was previously believed to be "missing" because both Battelle and Wright historians were unable to locate it. Earlier research had revealed a paper trail that led from Roswell to Wright Patterson, to the doors of Battelle - and to this 1949 study.

Once received, investigators were astounded to learn that the sought study was in fact co-authored by none other than Elroy John Center. Center was a Battelle scientist who - in June of 1960 - had privately related that he had analyzed metal from a fallen UFO when he was at the Institute. Citations that had been found to this Battelle report had not listed Center as a co-author. When the report was finally received, Center was revealed to be an "et al" or "and others" author of the study. Center's story about examining ET debris was first publicly told in 1992. But it was not known that Center was the co-author of this Battelle study until it was obtained under FOIA in August of 2009!

BATTELLE MEMORIAL INSTITUTE

It was previously determined that Battelle (which operates six U.S. National Laboratories) was a likely organization to have analyzed such material. Founded in 1929, Battelle remains a major research and defense contracting organization.

THE METAL

Some of the crash metal at Roswell was reported by several credible witnesses to have had "shape memory" characteristics. When crumpled, this "morphing" metal returned immediately and seamlessly to its original form. Shape recovery metals ("memory metals") are today emerging as a technology with applications for use in everything from eyeglass frames to spacecraft. An intense review of this subject (reported in an earlier three-part series on the UFO Iconoclasts website) proved very revealing:

Nitinol (a lightweight Nickel-Titanium alloy that is the "Cadillac" of memory metals) finds its history in late 1940s metallurgical work at Battelle - in studies that were contracted by Wright Patterson in the months immediately following the Roswell crash.

• A metals expert at Battelle during the time - Dr. Howard C. Cross - was leading a dual life secretly researching UFOs for government agencies while at the same time directing top-secret Titanium alloy studies. It was found that Cross "seeded" Titanium alloy studies to the US Navy Lab - where Nitinol was later "discovered."

• Titanium alloy was named as part of the composition of the Roswell memory metal according to General Arthur Exon, Wright's one-time Base Commander. Exon also referred to the material's unique "processing" and that the "reports" on the metal "were still around." Exon spoke of "chemical analysis, compression tests and flexing." These were the precise tests found to have been conducted on Titanium alloys in the Battelle report received though FOIA.

• General George Schulgen (who led Intelligence at the Pentagon at the time of the crash) issued a formerly secret memo -just weeks after Roswell- informing his officers that the saucers may be made with materials "of composite construction" that used "various combinations of metals" and that were fabricated by "unusual methods" to achieve "extreme light weight." Schulgen's memo was written just one week prior to the issuance of the Battelle report!

• Major discrepancies in the "official" history of Nitinol were identified. Although Nitinol may not be the "actual" Roswell debris, its development and inspiration was found from material discovered crashed at Roswell in 1947.

• Citations to this 1949 Battelle report were found (as buried footnotes) within four military-sponsored studies. All of these studies related to shape-recovery or "memory metal" development. This includes a report authored by Dr. Fred Wang, the purported "co-inventor" of Nitinol in the 1960s at the US Navy Lab. Nitinol is comprised of Nickel and Titanium, and much of this 1949 report concerns itself with alloying these two metals. Wang was later discovered to have been involved in bizarre "mind over matter" experiments to see if Nitinol could be morphed using the mind's energy.

The Battelle study from 1949 was obtained through a FOIA request placed by Sarasota Herald Tribune reporter Billy Cox. Many of it pages are missing or are not numbered.

THE BATTELLE METAL STUDY

TITLE PAGE OF THE BATTELLE 1949 REPORT

The study's full title is "Second Progress Report Covering the Period September 1 to October 21, 1949 on Research and Development on Titanium Alloys Contract No. 33 (038)-3736." It is authored by "Simmons, C.W.; Greenidge, C.T., Craighead, C.M. and others." The Battelle report was completed for Wright Patterson Air Materiel Command.

The citations to this Second Progress Report were found in later military-sponsored studies on shape-memory metal development. They list the authors of this report as C.M. Craighead, F. Fawn and L.W. Eastwood. However, it was learned from reading the report that the citations to it were actually listing the authors of a subsection of the report - not the authors that are listed above, in the study's main title. This subsection (to which the later shape-memory metal studies refer) relates to a Nickel-Titanium Phase Diagram- that is required to make Nitinol.

Elroy John Center (who confessed to UFO debris analysis) is not listed among the study authors shown in the report title. He is rather, one of the "other" authors - as indicated in the study's title. The report's title identifies the three primary authors- and then follows with the phrase "and others." The technical subsection of the report that Elroy Center authored is very revealing, as are many sections found within the study:

TITLE OF ELROY CENTER'S SECTION OF BATTELLE REPORT

Center's section in the report (on page 97) is especially telling. General Exon spoke of the Roswell material as having undergone chemical analysis. Center was a Chemical engineer and his section of this report details chemical analysis to detect and quantify metal impurities. It is entitled "Analytical Methods for the Titanium Base Alloy." Titanium must be of ultra-high purity to be used for shape-memory metal applications. Center concentrates on detection of Oxygen in Titanium, a challenge faced when creating the memory metal Nitinol.

ELROY CENTER - WHY HIS CONFESSION TO UFO DEBRIS ANALYSIS HAS TO BE TRUE

Center was a Senior Research Chemist who worked for Battelle from 1939-1957 in materials sciences. University of Michigan alumni files and other papers that he authored while at Battelle confirm his employment and position. Originally from Hibbing, MN, Center received a BS in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1939.

Dr. Irena Scott (a former employee of both Battelle and the Defense Intelligence Agency) had known of Elroy Center's connection to ET metal analysis years before this Battelle report was released. She had even related Center's confession to MUFON, a civilian UFO research organization, as reported in a 1992 Ohio MUFON journal. But Center's name was not known to be associated with the Battelle 1949 metals report until it was received this month under FOIA.

In May of 1992, Dr. Scott talked to a mutual acquaintance who told her that in June of 1960 Center had privately related to him something very disturbing. Center had told his friend that while he was a Research Chemist at Battelle he was directed by his superiors to provide technical assistance on a strange project. He was to conduct evaluation of an unknown material that he was told was retrieved some time prior from a crashed "flying saucer." He said that the debris - like the Roswell debris - had highly unusual hieroglyphic-like markings. Center then stopped short and said nothing more. Center passed in 1991. Center's family confirms his intense interest in UFO study and in the extraterrestrial, including while at Battelle. Additional information confirming Center's involvement is now being developed and will soon be released.

Although this story was known publicly as early as 1992, no one knew that Elroy Center was a co-author of a Battelle report for Wright Patterson that has long been suspected to be associated with Roswell memory metal debris analysis! The likelihood of a story about Center examining UFO debris when at Battelle - and then 17 years later discovering for the first time that he was the very scientist who had co-authored the suspect 1949 Battelle report- cannot be mere coincidence. Of the thousands of reports and employees that Battelle has had over the years it could not be coincidence that it would be that very report -and that very scientist - that would be associated with the debris analysis years later!

THE REPORT WAS PREVIOUSLY "RESTRICTED" TO THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE -- WHEN RECEIVED UNDER FOIA, IT WAS INCOMPLETE

Receipt of the Battelle report was challenging. Historians at both Battelle and Wright Patterson were unable to locate this Second Progress Report even though they saw the same citations and footnotes to it that we did. This was why the report itself had been previously characterized in past articles by this author as "missing."

It was then decided that a FOIA request must be filed to secure the document. It required filing two FOIA requests, a reminder telephone call and the passage of 10 weeks. The report was subjected to official review for release by the office of the Secretary of the Air Force. It is now known that the document was previously restricted to viewing by authorized DoD (Department of Defense) personnel, despite the passage of over 60 years! According to the Air Force, the report was finally found in archives of the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) of DoD. The report was received through FOIA with portions of it missing. About 30% of the 119 pages are not included. Many are not numbered. The Air Force offers the explanation that this is due to document age, illegibility or the inability to reproduce certain parts of the report.

ONE OF THE STUDY'S AUTHORS WORKED DIRECTLY FOR A SECRET GOVERNMENT UFO RESEARCHER

We learn on Page 96 in the subsection of the report, "Investigation of Melting Titanium," that Battelle scientist L.W. Eastwood was examining ways to optimize the melting of Titanium to the greatest efficiencies possible. Effectively melting Titanium is required to make Nitinol memory metal. It appears that Battelle possessed an advanced arc furnace that Wright did not.

Incredibly, this very same scientist – L.W. Eastwood - reported to Battelle's UFO researcher for the USAF - Dr. Howard C. Cross. Eastwood and Cross were also frequent co-authors of technical treatises. Cross was not only a chief metallurgist at Battelle in the late 1940s and 1950s, he was at the same time a secret US government agency UFO investigator! Cross authored large sections of early Project Bluebook reports and was consulted by many agencies about UFO events. His story is told more completely in an article archived on UFO Iconclasts - "Roswell Metal Scientist: The Curious Dr. Cross." Cross had direct connections to government-sponsored UFO studies with such agencies as the USAF, NACA - the predecessor organization to NASA, the CIA and with U.S. Navy Intelligence. He was also the author of the controversial letter to Wright-Patterson on UFOs known in research circles as the "Pentacle Memo."

A PHASE DIAGRAM OF TITANIUM AND NICKEL IS INCLUDED IN THE STUDY -- TITANIUM AND NICKEL COMPRISE THE MEMORY METAL NITINOL

On Page 65 we find the section, "Evaluation of Experimental Titanium-Base Alloys" by C.M. Craighead, F. Fawn and L.W. Eastwood. On the next page we find a Nickel-Titanium (NiTi) Phase Diagram. This is the first military-sponsored study to create a "recipe" for mixing the two metals that comprise Nitinol memory metal. Citations to this are found buried as footnotes in four military-sponsored published later. All of these studies citing this diagram relate to the subject of shape recovery memory metal.

The report reveals an intense and sudden effort to conduct first-ever research on purified Titanium alloyed with other metals. As mentioned earlier, General Exon speaks to "Titanium" and "another metal" and that "the processing was different" when describing the composition of the Roswell debris. General Schulgen's memo (written one week prior to this Battelle metals report) speaks of UFOs whose "items of construction" are specially fabricated composites, using a variety of metals and possessing extreme light weight.

THE REPORT EXAMINES OTHER TITANIUM ALLOYS LATER RESEARCHED BY WRIGHT FOR SHAPE MEMORY POTENTIAL

Pages 82-85 of the document reveal an interest in the properties of Titatium-Zirconium or TiZr. In a study contracted by Wright-Patterson in 1965 to NYU, this 1949 Battelle report is cited by footnote. The subject of the NYU report, entitled "On the System Titanium-Zirconium," is on the shape-memory potential of TiZr!

THE REPORT EXAMINES "BENDABILITY" OF NEW ALLOYS

On Page 95 the document reveals a technical chart showing first-ever research in such areas as "Elongation," and "Minimum Bend Radius" of various advanced Titanium alloys. This indicates that they were closely examining elasticity, malleability and tensile strengths of newly created, high-purity Titanium alloys, including Nickel-Titanium, required to make Nitinol.

THE SECOND PROGRESS REPORT DOES NOT MENTION THE FIRST

No reference whatsoever to what must surely exist - a First Progress Report - is made in this 1949 Battelle Second Progress Report for Wright. What does the First Progress Report contain? Why is there no reference to it in the literature - or even within the FOIA-obtained Second Progress Report? Without a title, date or the authors' names, it is proving very difficult to locate this First Report [Naturally, these references may have been contained in the missing pages – Ed].

A MOON WALKER'S CLUES ABOUT BATTELLE AND UFOS

The Battelle-Roswell connection is further established in a telling statement made many years ago by a Man Who Walked on the Moon. Dr. Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man on the Moon, has recently made some very public supportive statements about the reality of Roswell. But in 1996, Dr. Mitchell provided clues to reporter Billy Cox about who kept the UFO secret:

"The information is now held primarily with a body of semi- or quasi- private organizations that have kind of spun-off from the military intelligence organizations of the past. There have been private groups involved with the issue for a number of years because they have the expertise." Breaking down Dr. Mitchell's sparse statement we can correlate that:

• Battelle is a "semi or quasi private organization"

• Battelle was "spun off from the military intelligence organizations of the past." {In fact, it has recently been learned that Battelle's Director at the time of the Roswell crash was Clyde Williams. Williams was at the same time serving on the government's Research and Development Board- and as Trustee of the Rand Corporation. Williams worked at the R&D Board with Dr. Eric Walker and Dr. Robert Sarbacher- both of whom later indicated their personal knowledge of the crash event! Other documents show that Williams had an intense personal interest in advanced Titanium alloy development.}

• Battelle is shown to have been "involved in the issue for a number of years." It is now acknowledged that Battelle played a significant role as a contractor to Project Blue Book and to other official government UFO studies.

• Battelle scientists - like Cross and Center - certainly had the needed "expertise" to analyze such things.

Battelle (like its think-tank cousin RAND Corporation) is an organization that is part of the "military industrial complex" of which a former General, President Eisenhower warned we should make sure remains in check. With this investigation, we have done what the General ordered.

BATTELLE AND ET SCIENCE

Battelle's historic involvement in applying our science to understanding extraterrestrial science is no longer hidden. The truth is now revealed. Battelle Memorial Institute analyzed the materials of construction of a crashed craft from another world.

8-16-09

* Special Thanks To Tony Bragalia & Rich Reynolds

From - THE UFO CHRONICLES: http://www.theufochronicles.com/2009/08/scientist-admits-to-study-of-roswell.html

Originally from The UFO Iconoclasts - http://ufocon.blogspot.com/2009/08/scientist-admits-to-study-of-roswell.html

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