“As I looked at the piece, with the light reflecting on the inner surface, I could see what looked like writing. At first I thought of Egyptian hieroglyphics, but there were no animal outlines or figures. They weren’t mathematical figures either; they were more like geometric symbols-squares, circles, triangles, pyramids, and the like. Approximately one-fourth of an inch tall, they were imprinted on the inner surface of the beam, and only on one side. They were not embossed into the I-beam but seemed more like part of its surface.”
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Monday 12 May 2014
Another Crashed UFO in New Mexico? - Richard's Room 101
Monday 11 November 2013
The Mummy Returns: Illuminati Cloning? - Richard's Room 101
Saturday 5 October 2013
Doctor Who and Transhumanism - Richard's Room 101
“Centuries ago by our Earth time, a race of men on the far distant planet Telos sought immortality. They perfected the art of cybernetics, the reproduction of machine functions in human beings. As bodies became old and diseased, they were replaced limb by limb, with plastic and steel. Finally, even the human circulation and nervous system were recreated, and brains replaced by computers. The first Cybermen were born.”
Thursday 27 December 2012
Talk Radio Europe - Richard Thomas Para-News Book Interview
Saturday 22 December 2012
A Room 101 Interview with Joy Porter
Joy Porter is Professor of Indigenous History within the History Department at Hull University and the author of Native American Freemasonry: Associationalism and Performance in America, a book the historian was writing when she was one of my lecturers at Swansea University back in 2007. I remember once in class the subject of the Freemasons came up (not hard considering George Washington and many other of the founding fathers of the United States were Freemasons) and after class I got into what must have seemed a bit of a odd conversation to the mainstream academic about secret societies, in particular the bizarre antics of Republicans and Democrats inside the Bohemian Grove. After seeing the Indian Freemasonry book was out, I decided to catch up with my old teacher and ask her some questions about the new book and the role of Freemasonry in the early United States.
Richard Thomas: Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions Joy. The first question I have is how did you go from writing and researching about Native Americans to writing a book about the history of Freemasonry in the United States?
Joy Porter: My first book was a biography of a key Seneca-Iroquois named Arthur Parker and he was a very committed Freemason. That got me thinking.
Richard Thomas: I know you are from Ireland and in one lecture I remember the topic of the Freemasons came up and someone in class said that in Northern Ireland there are a lot of Freemasons in the police and government. What were your initial thoughts, if any, about the secretive organization and did writing the book challenge your perceptions at all?
Joy Porter: To be honest, my knowledge of N. Irish Freemasonry is limited - that'd be a whole other book! My old friend Jim Smyth at Notre Dame has written about it in terms of Irish history- he's your man.
Richard Thomas: Thanks to the internet the Freemasons are famous for their strange rituals and costumes. Did you see any of these, what did you think? And in your opinion is Freemasonry a religion?
Joy Porter: In the US for many men it has served as a religion of sorts, but the organization itself has been very concerned over time to make clear that it is not a religion. This has not prevented organized faiths such as Catholicism from feeling very threatened by it.
Richard Thomas: The perception, of course, is that the Freemasons are an elitist organisation. So I was initially surprised to learn that Native Americans have been involved in Freemasonry for centuries. How did this happen and what were the motives of the white men who brought Native Americans into their lodges and how has this relationship changed over time?
Joy Porter: Answering that took me a whole book! In short, US Freemasonry accepted elite Indians because of the imagined world Indians were deemed to inhabit and because of the Indian relationship to ritual, something Masons respected. Once within Freemasonry, Indian Masons were able to retain aspects of their tribal and pan-Indian identities that they could not develop in the same ways in the non-Masonic world. I argue that the Indian Masonic relationship over time has largely been very positive for Indian and non-Indian Masons alike.
Richard Thomas: Given the secrecy involved in Freemasonry, historically how have non-Freemasons in the Native American community viewed Indians who become Freemasons?
Joy Porter: This is an enormous question that is another research project in its own right but in my experience at least, I found limited evidence of Indian folk resenting Indian Masons. But then, I wasn't looking for that data.
Richard Thomas: Many of America's founding fathers were admitted Freemasons. How important do you think Freemasonry was in the American Revolution?
Joy Porter: It had a significance certainly. The best book on the topic is by Steven Bullock.
Richard Thomas: Overall do you think Freemasonry has been a force for good in America, or does the secretive group deserve some of its bad reputation?
Joy Porter: Certainly a force for good in my opinion. Freemasonry upheld the colour line but so did most organizations when this was the norm. It gave a great deal to many communities. I think community-based associations generally are positive as they bring people together but as with any grouping, it will by definition be selective. Associations are as much about who is excluded as who is included but the evidence I found suggests that Freemasonry gave many men over time a sense of solace and brotherhood in a world increasingly bereft of such compensations.
Richard Thomas: Thanks Joy. What are some of the other books you've written?
Joy Porter: I've just published another book with Praeger, Land & Spirit in Native America (2012). It looks at how we comprehend wilderness and Indian land, including Indian "Sacrifice Areas" in the nuclear Southwest.
Friday 20 April 2012
A Room 101 Interview with Regan Lee
Saturday 24 March 2012
NASA’s Project Blue Beam - Will the US Government Stage UFO Sightings in 2012?
The Maya civilisation used many calendars to measure time and record history. The main two calendars used by most ordinary Maya would have been the 260-day Tzolkin and the 365-day Haab. Because neither of these calendars numbered years, a combination of both the Tzolkin and Haab dates was used to identify the precise date. This method was sufficient because a particular combination of the two dates would not occur again for about 52 years, which was above the general life expectancy of the time.
To specify dates that occurred more than 52 years ago the Maya used another calendar called the Long Count. This calendar identified a date by counting the number of days from the day when the Maya believed that time began, on August 12, 3114 BCE. The Long Count used a 360-day year called a Tun, in which 20 Tuns made up a Katun (72,00 days) and 20 Katuns made up a Baktun (144, 000 Tuns). The 13th Baktun will be completed on December 21, 2012, which is said to be the end of the 5,125-year-long “Great Cycle.” However, sceptics say that this is a misinterpretation and that there is no evidence that the Maya believed the world would end on that day.
Whatever the truth about 2012 it would seem that someone wants us to believe something Earth shattering will happen on December 21 in that year. The doomsday theory has been featured in bestselling books, as well as documentaries, films and popular TV shows.
In the last episode of The X-Files (tantalisingly called The Truth) it is discovered by agents Mulder and Scully that aliens plan on colonising the Earth on December 21, 2012.
When I asked Dean Haglund, who played Langly in The X-Files, about the 2012 revelation in the final episode of the sci-fi cult, he told me he was sceptical about 2012 doomsday scenarios:
Here is an excellent example of a collective fear manifesting itself into popular culture. Since this airing, 2012 has become the hot topic at all the conventions, however, as Paul Dean said in our documentary, when he was talking to a Mayan priest about all of this, he said that ‘western society has it all wrong’ and that since we cannot hold a duality in our minds, a quantum Schrodinger's Cat scenario if you will, then we can only picture the end of something as a finite disaster and not both that and the re-awakening into the light.
Haglund was less sceptical, however, about the possibility that US government agencies could have been feeding information to The X-Files writers.
“I have heard that the popular culture is used as a tool by whatever elite, business, government, Illuminati, etc., to both gauge and control the populace,” The X-Files and Lone Gunmen star told me when I asked him about his comments on The Alex Jones Show back in 2005 about the script writers being approached by members of the CIA, FBI and NASA with ideas for episodes.
But why would US Government insiders want the viewers of The X-Files to associate 2012 with an alien invasion? One popular theory on the internet is NASA’s alleged partly declassified Project Blue Beam, a supposed plan by the US Government to create a “New World Order” by staging a fake UFO invasion using holograms and other advanced technology. A researcher who appeared in the documentary film The New World Order and is a screen writer himself, told me in an interview:
“The alien invasion hoax is also another reason why so many Hollywood science fiction movies involve aliens arriving in vast armadas to destroy us and take over our planet. They were quite prevalent in the 50s and you can find modern-day examples like Independence Day, War of the Worlds and even Mars Attacks. Very few movies about extra-terrestrials actually involve aliens with peaceful intentions. E.T. certainly comes to mind, but even movies where they arrive as our benevolent ‘saviours’ like The Day The Earth Stood Still, is still another permutation of the New World Order hoax, in which case it's about giving up our sovereignty, our ‘petty little differences’ as Reagan put it, and joining a fascist global regime in order to achieve an alleged ‘world peace’. It will be world peace but with a seriously heavy price on our freedoms. Mostly, though, these movies are programming us to believe that once we see vast armadas of classified military vehicles hovering in the sky, that they will in fact be UFOs driven by ‘extra-terrestrials’ who are here to ‘kill us and take over our planet.’ And then the only solution we'll be presented with will be a heavy reliance on a Militarised 'New World Order' to save us. That's where the real agenda lies.”
While many UFO researchers are sceptical about some of the specifics about Project Blue Beam, the basic premise that the US Government might be fostering the belief that UFOs represent aliens from outer space is another matter. The US government definitely has technology a lot more advanced than what they admit to having. In 1993 the “father of stealth” Ben Rich, director of Lockheed's Skunk Works from 1975 to 1991, stated at the University of California School of Engineering in 1993: “We already have the means to travel among the stars, but these technologies are locked up in black projects . . . and it would take an Act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity.”
Other government insiders have also made comments implying the US Government were behind UFOs or at least hyping the ETH. In his book, The Secret Team, Colonial Fletcher Prouty, who was the real life basis for the Mr X character in Oliver Stone’s film JFK, speculated that with the fall of communism in the early 1990s UFOs and aliens would take the place of the Soviet Union as the new major threat to the United States.
"This is the fundamental game of the Secret Team. They have this power because they control secrecy and secret intelligence and because they have the ability to take advantage of the most modern communications system in the world, of global transportation systems, of quantities of weapons of all kinds, and when needed, the full support of a world-wide U.S. military supporting base structure. They can use the finest intelligence system in the world, and most importantly, they have been able to operate under the canopy of an assumed, ever-present enemy called ‘Communism.’ It will be interesting to see what ‘enemy’ develops in the years ahead. It appears that ‘UFO's and Aliens’ are being primed to fulfil that role for the future. To top all of this, there is the fact that the CIA, itself, has assumed the right to generate and direct secret operations."
More recently Mark Pilkington in his new book Mirage Men has argued that instead of perpetrating a UFO cover-up the US intelligence agencies have really been promoting ideas like alien abductions, UFO crashes and recoveries, and secret bases all along.
“In the book I'm specifically referring to those people from military and intelligence organisations who have used the UFO lore as a cover for their operations and, in extreme cases, have seeded new material within the UFO culture to further muddy the waters,” Mark Pilkington told me when I interviewed him in 2010. Although Mark didn’t think all UFOs were explainable.
“I'm not sceptical about UFOs themselves – people see them every day – nor am I sceptical of the existence of ET life, I believe it's out there, and I can accept that it will come here and perhaps even has done at some point in our past. What I am very sceptical of is the popular notion of ET visitation as presented in the UFO lore that has emerged since the late 1940s. This has developed out of a multi-directional feedback loop between UFO experiencers, UFO book authors, mainstream popular culture and those in the military and intelligence worlds who would exploit and shape these beliefs and ideas.”
So will the US Government or one of its alphabet agencies really stage a massive UFO sighting on December 21, 2012? We’ll have to wait to see. But with the London Olympics, Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the US presidential election all taking place in 2012 perhaps we shouldn’t be so focused on December 21 in particular.