Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, September 2023
Earth Energies and the Mysterious Manifestations of Light and other Effects
by: Brent Raynes
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"You need to go back," a Navajo Indian told Benjamin Lonetree. "That is where the earth speaks."
At the time, Benjamin, an electrical engineer, was working with a construction crew over around Flagstaff, many of the workers being Navajo. One day one of them asked if he'd been to Sedona yet. He admitted that he had briefly been there back in 1999, when he heard about its "mysterious Vortex Energy," but initially considered it was just another "tourist trap."
However, the Navajo worker's statement aroused his curiosity and shortly afterwards he returned to Sedona with scientific equipment to test out this whole vortex notion. "I found out something was definitely different about Sedona. And here we are 24 years later with knowledge gained using a lot of scientific measurement equipment." Benjamin maintains a very informative website on his ongoing research and investigations into the sciences of earthly frequencies, the electromagnetic spectrum, geomagnetism, and brainwave resonance. Entitled The Sedona Effect, the website can be found at: https://www.sedonanomalies.com
Dr. Greg Little and British researcher and author Andrew Collins visited with Benjamin at the legendary Bradshaw Ranch out near Sedona, Arizona last year, as well as other locations nearby, and he demonstrated for them how his electronic equipment can detect unique and rather anomalous earth energies. And, for those not familiar with Sedona and the Bradshaw Ranch, I highly recommend they read Merging Dimensions: The Opening Portals of Sedona, by Tom Dongo and Linda Bradshaw (1995). Still available on Amazon. Here's a YouTube video where Greg is at a site in Sedona explaining these energies and the significance of Benjamin Lonetree's instrumented studies: https://www.facebook.com/gregoryl.little.7/videos/489607209732328
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"Natural spaces such as mountaintops, rock formations, intersections of waterways, and caves were used by shamans as spots where they could consistently gain contact," Greg Little wrote in Origins of the Gods, which he co-authored with Andrew Collins (2022). "These were places where the connection could be more easily established and where the spiritual forces seemed to emerge on their own. Today, we know that all of these types of places have magnetic anomalies, nearby tectonic fault lines, and radioactive energy sources." In this issue, check out our YouTube interview where noted researcher and author Christopher O'Brien shares with us an anomalous site he has found in Colorado's Crestone, located in the northern region of the San Luis Valley. (Begin around 1:23 on the video) It's a very specific area about 100 feet in diameter. Circular like. He explained how "just everything from trooping fairies to undulating transparent forms to bizarre wiggling light worms" have appeared there. He shared how he had taken the well-known paranormal author and reeearcher Rosemary Ellen Guiley there on one occasion and how they were "accosted by three energetic forms that chased us out of there."
Chris described it as "one of the oldest visited spots by humans. It goes back 13,000 years. This was obviously a Native American camping site or possibly a religious site for thousands of years. It's got big mojo."
A researcher named John Burke described visiting ancient sacred sites in England, across the United States, and down into Central America, finding surprising results. "Overwhelmingly, the ancient megalithic architects all over the world chose to build on conductivity discontinuities, and then designed and built these enormous structures in such a way as to further concentrate the natural electromagnetic energies present at those sites," he told me in an interview. "We wondered how an ancient people without our fluxgate magnetometer, electrostatic voltmegter, and ground electrodes could have discovered such energies. But then we stumbled into a spot in the Black Hills of South Dakota that was both a geomagnetic anomaly and a vision quest site, dating from the days of Crazy Horse and his visions. That's when we found that many sensitives, such as shamans, can sense these energies as well as our instruments."
John Burke (who sadly has since passed on) wrote a wonderful book on his findings with his colleague Kaj Halberg, entitled Seed of Knowledge, Stone of Plenty. The book can be read as a pdf file on Kaj Halberg's website at: https://kajhalberg.dk/en/books/seed-of-knowledge-stone-of-plenty/
In a recent Skype conversation with paranormal researcher and author Peter Jordan the subject of a particular poltergeist investigation came up. Peter had been involved with many such cases, and this one, in Hackettstown, New Jersey, back in the 1970s involved a family with the last name of Ricardo. In this case there was an extraordinary occurrence when one of his colleagues, a William Wagner, who Peter described as a brilliant scientific researcher and theoretician, suggested conducting a unique experiment. Already at this site Geiger counters in the backyard of this "haunted" residence had detected a gamma radiation reading of 50 counts per second, which was precisely where a respected sensitive and biochemist named Ronald Mangravite had claimed to have psychically witnessed an apparent past ritual being done by black-robed figures burying a brown furry animal in the ground.
"Although no causal connection was suggested at the time, Wagner felt the unusual reading warranted further research," Peter wrote in Fate magazine (October 1980 edition). "So, using an 'ionizer' device invented and built by co-worker John Burkenbush, the team attempted to lure the alleged phenomenon into the visible realm. The ionizer consists of two metallic poles about six feet high which are planted firmly in the ground. Attached to each pole at mid-point is a large wire pyramid which is linked to a high-voltage amplifier. Wagner and his associates hoped to stimulate quartz-bearing rock (if any) resting beneath the surface and perhaps induce phenomena. The family was asked to turn off all house lights inside and out and join the researchers in the yard. The ionizer was activated and with the apex of each pyramid separated by a two-inch gap, an occasional spark was seen to jump from one pole to the other as fireflies flew unwittingly into this death zone.
"For more than 15 minutes there was visually no activity. Then one of the men, kneeling at the controls, cursed as the amplifier's five-watt fuse blew out. He replaced the unit with a new amplifier and the night watch continued. Suddenly a steady light appeared between the two poles and my attention was drawn to an eerie blanket of blue light which seemed to shroud the Ricardo home. Like a corona in a Kirlian photograph, it was diffuse and halo-like. Standing 20 feet or more from the structure and flanked by three fellow investigators I tried looking at the phenomenon from every possible angle, but it never varied. All of us described seeing the very same thing and two psychics present claimed to see an ephemeral 'presence' pulsating in a second-floor window. But, except for the halo of light, I did not see any other unusual phenomena that night."
In a recent interview with Peter on this case he recalled for me additional backround information and details of the New Jersey group Vestigia's investigations that led up to some of those investigators seeing a potential connection between the so-called Long Valley "spooklight" and this thought-provoking investigation of the Hackettstown haunting, which Peter began investigating soon after being notified of the case by the Psychical Research Foundation in November 1976, which was also the same month and year (November 20, 1976) that the Vestigia investigations conducted their very first "field experiments" of a one mile stretch of unused railroad track, described as a virtual straightaway. Both investigations experimentally explored the idea that the phenomena manifesting at both sites were drawing upon earth generated energies.
Peter recently told me, "The trajectory of the light, in the Vestigia investigation, was such that it would swing from side-to-side, in a pendulum- like fashion, as it would move up and down the tracks, always going in a straight line, like the trajectory of a railroad car going forward. This was an unused portion of rail track, which then stops abruptly. There's no more track there. So, the light would drift like that, moving up and down the tracks, following the path of the iron rails, which Vestigia believed was a conduit; allowing the voltage from beneath the ground to become amplified. This is where the fault line is too, so it's following the fault line and as its moving like that, its swinging, following the track and when it got to the end it disappeared, where there were no more tracks."
"We were overrun by unruly mobs of people that were coming day and night to see what Vestigia was doing. That's why you keep these things quiet, but back then it was very hard to do that, especially in a small town. Everybody knew about the mystery light and they saw our trucks, and even though we had the police there kind of guarding it, people snuck in, and then kids would go at night. So, it was really, really hard."
"There were a lot of complaints about it and people were pressuring the town to ask permission from Con Rail to rip up the tracks. Of course, they had no issue with that as the tracks weren't being used. So, they ripped up the tracks and that was the last day that the light was ever seen again, further supporting the idea that the railroad tracks themselves seemed to be crucial in this case to the production of the field that allowed these balls to be created."
"Of course, other people said, 'No, it happened afterwards.' So, we started reaching out to see if anybody reported it since. At the time too, we were in contact with Mark Sceurman, who was the editor of a wonderful magazine called Weird New Jersey, which you used to get on the newstands. It was a big, real thick magazine too, and it highlighted you all the different places in New Jersey where things were happening. Mark used to actually go out and investigate a lot of these places and then he was able to flesh out new witnesses because he had a huge readership. If you were from New Jersey you could say to anybody on the street Weird New Jersey and they'd go, 'Oh, that magazine.' Everybody knew it because it always had garish covers. So, they had it at Barnes and Nobles, in the bookstores right next to Fate and UFO magazine."
"So, when Vestigia started this he featured an article. I think I did one of the interviews and somebody else did the article. Mark also tried to find witnesses after the tracks got ripped up and everything, and he never found witnesses to it afterwards."
"A lot of researchers confronted with mystery lights will say they're simply caused by headlights. Certainly, there are some cases in which headlights can produce a similar kind of. However, what Vestigia did very thoroughly from what they told me is spent a long time working out eliminating the possibility of any of these being headlights. What they actually did was get in cars and drive down to these locations at night. They had people in various positions to observe. It was a totally different kind of appearance than what headlights seem to produce than the "plasma balls" they witnessed. In those cases, they would often be standing like maybe five feet away. And the ball of light would often come toward them. And it wasn't just a case of there's a light. There were other measurements taken simultaneously. Like methane gas, which is often present during earthquake activity, and a Trifield meter that would measure radio waves, and a magnetometer." Other instruments in use were Geiger counters, oscilloscopes, a Vascar radar unit, thermometers, and other "assorted auxiliary equipment."
Peter states that some 10,000-man hours were spent investigating the light, and the value of assorted equipment that was used was over $30,000. The team members who were involved in investigating it were a total of 16 people, and they came from various backgrounds of expertise in electronics, meteorology, physics, optics, photography, chemistry, and mathematics.
Dr. Michael Persinger, the American-Canadian professor of psychology at Laurentian University from 1971 until his passing in 2018, who possessed a great interest in the possible connection between UFO and Fortean type occurrences as earth generated manifestations, had been a consultant to Vestigia during these investigations. He was quite impressed by Vestigia's work, noting in the second quarter of the 1981 Pursuit magazine (published by SITU, the Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained): "P. A. Jordan's description of a classic haunting in New Jersey demonstrates the multifaceted (and multivariate) nature of haunt-like phenomena as well as the coincidence of proximal tectonic activity. The repeated measurements by Wagner and his colleagues of the Vestigia group have given the most comprehensive profile to date about a recurrent luminosity that appears to be coupled with activity along a local fault."
There remains so much that still needs and remains to be further researched and investigated regarding these very unusual phenomena.
Vestigia Newsletter on spooklight, 1977
UFOs and Earthquakes Creighton
