Plan 9,000,009 From Outer Space: The State of Paranormal Movies and the Problem of Sameness (Yeti's Peak #3)

All is well and quiet as a new dawn approaches. Cities hum with industry and human interaction. Rural areas are springing to life for another day of hard work like the petals of a flower opening in the early morning hours. Life, the continuum, marches on with little variation. That is until one day something isn't quite right. There is an intrusion, a commotion, a strange happening. At first it's subtle, and then it's not so subtle any more and people begin to notice. The government gets involved, and before long our quiet, average day has been ruined by (what else?) an alien invasion. Evil, hubristic, unilaterally hegemonic aliens have come to enslave our people and take our resources. Our only chance is to fight back, but our weapons are inadequate. We fight valiantly, up to the point where extinction seems the only possible outcome. But somehow we humans pull through and defeat the alien race threatening the Earth that we took for granted (see: Raped) for so long and now have come to appreciate. If only Hollywood writers could be even half as clever as the poorly written characters in our current spate of paranormal movies are we would have some pretty amazing science fiction.

So this hypothetical alien invasion plot, heard it before? Yeah, we all have. In fact while writing it several scenes from several so called paranormal films coursed through my mind's eye. And once you've seen one, trust me, you've seen them all. This little piece of vitriol came to me whilst in line at a local movie theater. I noticed the iconic scene from the Battle of Los Angeles (the one with spotlights trained on the sky over the greater LA area during WWII) as the premise for a movie poster. I got chills, literally, this poster was a classic, and had other pictures of supposed flying saucers to accompany the prior one. “Finally...” I thought, though my friends couldn't understand my excitement, “a movie about a classic UFO sighting and mystery!”. Boy, was I ever wrong. After the movie I visited the Internet Movie Database to watch a preview of Battle: LA aka The Battle of Los Angeles, and instead of my mind being blown I couldn't help but think “I've seen this before.” And so begins the end of science fiction in mainstream movies. This movie might have been ably titled The Battle of War of The Worlds in District 9 codename: Cloverfield on Independence Day of The Fourth Kind because that's the exact vibe I'm getting from the preview and I'd bet my next paycheck that that is exactly what the viewing audience is going to get. With a B-List of nameless actors, CGI that could have been done, and done better, ten years ago with a plot so tired that Michael Bay could have written it in his sleep, I'm left wondering whatever happened to creative, allegorical science fiction. The soul searching of authors like Kim Stanley Robinson, Usula K. Le Guin and Robert J. Sawyer has been overlooked by a Hollywood that prefers oversimplified rehashes of H.G Wells (which is not to diminish Wells in anyway but merely the uncreative and predictable nature of our current sci-fi films). What we're left with are disaster/alien movies. After all, Mother Nature is so twenty years ago, so why not turn to martians? Bigger (by which we mean more outlandish) is always better right?

Movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind,and E.T. flew in the face of such hackneyed and predictable 1950's style sci-fi which imagined space aliens as ugly, marauding invaders and offered audiences some amount of soul searching as well as a less threatening idea of life beyond our little planet. Even when the aliens were the antagonist, a la Ridley Scott's pathbreaking film Alien, they weren't bent on destroying Los Angeles or New York City in a grand, cinematic blaze of pyrotechnics, they were after something more personal, and the writers were keen on asking questions of our existence and place in the universe. The disparity between films like Alien and more recent pieces could fill page after page of rant to the point of exhaustion, so I will waste little time with them. I would however like to point out that most of the new alien/disaster movies share a sameness that was not seen in previous films. Either writers have become lazy and churn out the same piece of work for lack of better ideas or they merely have struck upon a way to make some small fortune and have been running the same gag over and over for an unquestioning audience that vapidly consumes anything resembling spectacle or an epic ( for me, the latter term presently carries a specific level of linguistic disgust, anything and everything is now “epic” which is either meant to be sarcastic, in which case it's become overused, or people really think that everything is “epic”. Either way it makes me tune out the rest of what the speaker of the word “epic” in the vernacular sense is saying). Have audiences become less intelligent? I couldn't say, there has always been the philosophy that each new generation is worse than the previous (although I doubt my grandfather's generation would feel that to be true), but few who have studied their aesthetics would disagree that movies have become less intelligent and far too banal.

While our city-wide destruction blood-lust seems to be in full bloom, I can only hope there is someone at home now reading and watching thought provoking science fiction with the hopes of reversing the course of over-blown CGI nightmares that we presently have in favor of a more subtle and intriguing art form. Which reminds me, has anyone seen Moon with Sam Rockwell and Kevin Spacey? Thought provoking and subtle, well I guess all hope isn't lost. A diamond in the dumpster which was film in 2009.

Recommended reading:

Mars trilogy - Kim Stanley Robinson

Calculating God - Robert Sawyer

The Word for World is Forrest – Ursula K. Le Guin

Let The Right One In – John Ajvide Lindqvist

-Pete Tognetti

Psychic Vampires, Orbs, Abductee Superstars and the Changing of the Guards (Yeti's Peak #2)

I find myself thinking more and more these days “Whatever happened to UFOlogy?”. This enigmatic little term is what originally got me into the paranormal; as a kid I was obsessed with and slightly terrified by TV specials like Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction? and anything Whitley Streiber had going on back in those days, and who could forget A Fire In The Sky? When I think back on it, as a horror movie it does little for me outside of the first half hour, but it was huge in the mid-nineties. But this is all pop culture right? It's art imitating life right? At least so the legend goes. The other day I read an article that Skeptical Enquirer posted on their facebook about the demise of Abuctology, a branch of UFOlogy I'm assuming, and suddenly it all started to make sense. The article, which can be found here: http://badufos.blogspot.com/2011/01/abductology-implodes.html is a scathing expose on the outright frauds that were the founders of abduction theory in the 80's and 90's. People like Budd Hopkins, of which I'm not proud to admit, but I've read everyone of his books about hypnotic regression and the abductee, and a couple of other jokers whom I've only heard of in passing. The history of abductology is one that started as a rather far flung, yet disturbing, theory about visitors from other dimensions or outer space actively working to abscond with unsuspecting victims to preform odd medical experiments and/or reveal some arcane truth about the universe to. And somewhere, without scientific scrutiny, it became an accepted fact by far too many people. Does this mean that some people are just stupid and gullible? Hardly, but it speaks to one of our basic fears. No one wants to be kidnapped by strange looking creatures, who's mercy we are at and violated. It flies in the face of our cultural and individualist urges. We all have unalienable rights, right? So if invasion of our personal space is one of our great fears, and persists to this day as one, how do we explain this recent obsession with ghosts and vampires and the disappearance of UFOlogy?

It shouldn't take Freud to see that people, the world over, are concerned with death. And death here really translates to a fear of the unknown (of which the previous paragraph also has some claim to). For any individual or group to claim they know what lies beyond this mortal coil (if anything) is dangerously absurd. Authors Michel Onfray and Chris Hedges have both hinted at organized religion being something akin to “death cults”, organizations concerned at times more with how grand the afterlife will be at the expense of making life on Earth more tolerable. After all, life is for the living. But my beef today isn't with religion and everlasting life in some heaven or hell, it is with the somewhat secular variation of life after death or the rejection of death all together.

If pop culture is to be used as a cultural barometer then we have a clear interest in ghosts and a spiritual afterlife. Shows like Ghost Hunters, Paranormal State, Ghost Adventures, and the like can't help but point towards this. But what do shows like the aforementioned tell us about the afterlife? That we're doomed to spend eternity making only the briefest of appearances in run -down historic sites and quaint New England homes? The answer is that these shows tell us nothing except for the fact that people are afraid of death and want to know what happens next. The life equivalent to an epilogue. But more to the point, these shows are part of an ever changing and oh-so topical fad. We are witnessing a paranormal changing of the guard. What was Betty and Barney Hill some far of decades ago are replace by Grant Wilson and Jason Hawes (of TAPS fame) to fuel our interest in the unknown, and while they're at it, why not make some money? Keep in mind I'm not suggesting that the Hill's made money off of their oft quoted and sited supposed abduction, but there are plenty in the UFO field who have. But Cold Wart hysteria has thankfully subsided in its traditional sense, UFOs and alien abduction is looking a tad long in the tooth. But there's that tricky specter of death still hanging around, and ghosts are only the start of our fixation on death. Everlasting life is the next logical step, after all, who wants to spend an eternity in a place where they died?

In the fall of 2008 I began to surf various message boards about the paranormal, simply trying to answer any UFO history questions or give skeptical advice to misguided paranormal hunters I might find. I noticed there to be several threads common to a lot of posts on these boards and that was an interest in vampires. 'Why vampires?' I thought to myself, 'Do they mean real, honest vampires, or is this a literature question?' thinking only of Bram Stoker's classic Dracula. I was hoping (and ultimately saddened) that people weren't seriously asking if vampires were real. But, oh, they were. Upon some thoroughly half-assed research I found that there was in fact a literary connection to all this, much to my delight. That is until I read said literary inspiration. 2008 was the year the series of novels Twilight were beginning to be made into film adaptations. I'd seen the preview at theaters and didn't make any connection between there being a book of the same title or even that it involved vampires, but now I had a link. Upon reading everything Twilight and seeing the film(s) I was amused at the nearly limitless philosophical timeliness and implications of the books and the present dilemma of the popularity of ghost hunting shows. The key to both was that they either offered an escape from living (being an immortal and good looking vampire) or an answer to what happens after death (being a spirit trapped on earth for whatever reason). Both were rejections of the conventional notion of death and to assent to some heaven. It's perfect for the post 9/11 generation, it's theistic (in that there is a soul and/or afterlife) without being religious, it offers panacea to those worried (and unrealistically so) that there life will end at any second at the hands of a mad man.

Despite the seemingly bad idea that is using the paranormal as any kind of positive cultural indicator (my deepest apologies James Randi), it seems as though ghosts, vampires, and space aliens are a perfect psycho-analysis tool, instead of asking 'What's wrong today?' perhaps we ought to look at what's on TV.

-Pete Tognetti (01/27-28/11)

Recommended reading:

The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative, Thomas King

The Culture of Fear, Barry Glassner

Flim Flam, James Randi

Reaching the Summit/ Hometown Haunts (Yeti's Peak #1)

Welcome to The Yeti's Peak, an online spot soon to be full of essays, musings and late night drunken ramblings about all things paranormal from the sometimes keen eye of an unrepentant skeptic. I believe a brief introduction is in order first, my name is Pete, and I'm a college graduate currently living in a larger suburb south of Denver, Colorado. I've been interested in the paranormal since I was about twelve years old and have been involved in field research since 2007. Over the years I've either become cynical or less gullible, either way as I mentioned before I am a skeptic. So why persist dealing with something I clearly have no belief in? Why waste my precious time writing online articles that are sure to be read by maybe two or three people? To quote George Mallory, the famed mountaineer, when asked why he climbed Mount Everest, “[b]ecause it's there.”. The paranormal, the arcane, the sensational, and the like are always going to be with us, and it is important not to study it as if it were real phenomena which is happening and meant to frighten us, but as being part of our folklore. Folklore can tell you a lot about a particular region (ie, military bases, nuclear installations always have UFO sightings around them, old Western towns, mineral mines, old houses, etc... have their ghost stories, and who can ignore wooded and foliage choked areas with Bigfoot sightings or deep ancient lakes and the monsters that supposedly dwell within?) or a particular people. Native Americans have stories of Skinwalkers (shape-shifters, or shamen) and Catholics have their demons to exorcise (I suppose this could be taken any number of ways, but let us stick to folklore for now). So, besides the paranormal simply being there for me to laugh at, ridicule and write about, it is also an important anthropological essence in the human experience.

Now that that can of worms has been opened and not fully realized it's time to move on to something odd and worthy of discussion. I am an avid hiker and frequent a local spot here about fifteen minutes away from my house in Littleton for a weekly trail run. This trail is short and sweet and traverses most of the northern edge of a small town called Morrison, home of the famed and natural Red Rocks Amphitheater. When I was a kid my parents used to take my sister and I to the dinosaur tracks near this trail and the Mother Cabrini Shrine nearby and told us once of a story of a Virgin Mary sighting there. Of course this terrified me as a child, although looking back at it, there are far worse things to see than the Holy Mother, but when you're a kid, life and fears don't always make sense. In my late teens and early twenties I attended many concerts at the amphitheater, and have been to countless bars and restaurants in the area so I guess I could say that I know the area well. When preparing this article I wanted to have a “hometown haunt” or sighting to throw in to emphasize the folklore point. I had a UFO sighting in Reseda, California all ready to go (our webmaster lived in Reseda this previous summer and I was born in Northridge, CA not far from Reseda) but alas the account on the MUFON site was less than interesting. So, strapped for a new story to pique reader's interest, I looked for something in Colorado. Boy did I find a whopper! I'm not entirely sure if this report counts as a ghost story or a Close Encounter of the Third-ish kind, but regardless it's interesting and it ties together with my reminiscing about Morrison.

The story begins with an individual and her dog sitting house for her parents who live on a modest expanse of land in Morrison, CO (see, I told you it tied together) and late one evening the witness reports seeing several blue flashes out of the corner of her eye. She thinks nothing of it and continues cleaning up in the kitchen. Less than a minute later she sees the blue flashes again but this time in full view. The witness and her dog are both very aware of the blue flashes coming from the land behind the house at which point the witness hears a loud bang from an upstairs bedroom. Terrified, the witness grabs a gun and proceeds to call the police, positive now that what was seen in the backyard were flashlights and the bang an intruder. The police arrive in a timely manner (something they're not really known for in Denver) and proceed to ask questions about the event. But, and to paraphrase the witness, this is where this ordeal gets unusual. The police doing the questioning are more concerned about the blue lights seen than the possibility of an intruder (none was found obviously), when pressed as to their interest in such matters the police tell the witness that not only have they received numerous calls throughout the year regarding these lights, another officer has seen them recently too (ufostalker.com).

This is hair-on-the-back-of-your-neck kind of stuff for sure, but is it paranormal? This is the question I will be asking throughout every post of this kind I write. Consider for a moment that Colorado's northern neighbor, Wyoming, has no law banning fireworks, ones which emit all kinds of flashes, sparks, etc... and plenty that boom and bang too. Now, I'm not saying that this sighting of whatever it was is merely someone goofing around with fireworks, but isn't this a more logical solution than assuming that space aliens or ghosts are stalking around in Morrison residents' yards and breaking and entering? This would explain the numerous sightings, and the police interest in the matter (fireworks are generally frowned upon severely in the foothills and mountains here). So while I have no answer (neither does MUFON for that matter) on this particular sighting, I do have a theory that doesn't involve ET. And why bother with throwing my hat in a ring covered already by law enforcement and MUFON? Because it's there. And because folklore needs an appropriate outlet, which is what I will attempt to create with this forum.

- Pete Tognetti, 01/19-20/11