The Rabbit Hole That Never Ends
This entry is the second of a three-part series inspired by a particular event which transpired at the mysterious and infamous Skinwalker Ranch. I encourage you to read the first part “Fastwalkers or Shit-Talkers” before jumping into part two. I do my best to reference back to the first piece as needed but I still think the context is important. Plus… you have the time otherwise you wouldn’t be here reading my stupid blog in the first place.
A Standard Disclaimer
Before we go any further I would like to make sure you understand I am under no illusions about my qualifications (or lack-there-of) to discuss the matters I intend to discuss. I read a lot of weird shit. I consider myself to be open-minded but skeptical. Depending on who you are, after reading this post, you will likely disagree with either the former or latter part of the previous statement. I hope that you will dialogue with me about this post. If there is something that you disagree with enough to post about, I will ask you to be specific. I associate with many people and no two agree on every point. However, if you’re someone who makes a habit of mocking others or their work because you disagree with their approach or conclusions about UFOs, ghosts, cryptids etc. then you need re-examine your approach to life online (and probably offline too if we’re being honest). All of that being said… let’s get weird with it.
New Details from Bob Bigelow
George Knapp’s most recent interview with Bob Bigelow was predictably excellent and provided much insight into many of the things people like me want to know more about… namely Skinwalker Ranch. Mr. Bigelow recounted the story of a visiting DIA agent (James Lacatski) who had an extraordinary encounter that Bigelow describes as “a customized exhibition by the phenomenon”, prompting further government interest in the ranch. This story has been shared in multiple places by multiple people. If you wanted a detailed synopsis, a good place to start would be the blog of Joe Murgia, who always seems to be documenting important data-points before the rest of us take notice. But it is interesting to hear Bigelow recount the story as it was relayed to him directly from Lacatski:
Bob Bigelow (recounting what Lacatski told him):
“It was rotating… it was tubular… …there was a rock group that had an album called tubular bells… …that’s what’s on the cover apparently… and he said “That’s the closest thing I can come to as to what the structure of this looked like.””
These new details provided by Bigelow as to the object’s specific shape are interesting and would seem to deviate from past information we had at our disposal.
From Knapp’s Interview with Phenomenon Radio on October 11, 2018:
“It was something that appeared in the air, ten feet away from him, inside a house while he was having a conversation. And it was at such an angle that it was only viewable, of the group that was sitting there, within his line of sight. The thing appeared to him. He was trying to play it cool and not let everybody else know it was there. This guy. He’s a very serious, rock solid, brilliant guy, who had read the book and thought there might be something there of interest to the DIA and the Pentagon and national security. He’s in the main ranch house, hearing some stories from the caretakers who live there and this thing appeared inside the house, in broad daylight. And I’m not gonna get into details but it was pretty distinct and remarkable and it made a very big impression on this guy…
…And that ranch, whatever is there, had in essence given that guy from the DIA an engraved invitation to come back. And he did.”
From Jeremy Corbell’s Phenomenon Radio interview on September 27th, 2018:
“There was an agent, in particular, who went there and as he’s interviewing the people that lived at the ranch, he looks over their shoulder and he sees what looks like a metal, Möbius loop, just presenting itself. Physically, right there. He can see it with his eyes. He doesn’t mention it to the current people who lived at the ranch. And he sees it and it presents itself, even with, I believe some hieroglyphics on them.”
From Joe Murgia’s correspondence with Eric Davis in 2019:
“JL was in the living room of the former NIDS double wide observation trailer/staff quarters. A 3D object appeared in mid-air in front of him and changed shape like a changing topological figure. It went from pretzel-shaped to Möbius strip shaped. It was 3D and multi-colored. Then it disappeared.”
So What Changed?
It seems to me that even with Bigelow’s new details, the exact shape of what James Lacatski saw is still somewhat of a mystery. Its nature on the other hand… its characteristics… its properties… are not. I pointed out in part one of my take on this story that a significant property of the Möbius strip (perhaps even its defining property) is its non-orientability.
“The mobius strip is the simplest non-orientable surface.”
On the concept of orientability:
“In mathematics, orientability is a property of surfaces in Euclidean space that measures whether it is possible to make a consistent choice of surface normal vector at every point.”
From part one:
“What is there to notice? None of them look the same. There isn’t a common/regular/normal/right way to orient a mobius strip.”
“I think this thing — whatever it is — was conveying to “JL” that he couldn’t hope to understand it. It can’t be oriented. It can’t be observed according to a set of observed characteristics. There isn’t a common/regular/normal/right way to conceive of… whatever this is.”
At the time, I interpreted this personalized display as truth-based shit talk. These new details from Bigelow haven’t dissuaded me from my original hypothesis, even if what Lacatski saw wasn’t a mobius strip at all. The specific shape seems to have been moving or rotating… possibly even changing. Over time the descriptions have seemed to evolve and I don’t think we can completely attribute that to a “telephone pictionary” effect. I think the reason the descriptions have evolved is because what Lacatski saw was indescribable. If you talk to scientists and mathematicians about indescribable shapes that change and evolve… they’ll probably picture a Mobius strip… after all, it is apparently the “simplest” of all such surfaces.
The specific shape, while interesting, isn’t the primary take-away for the event (if in fact there was an intended take-away). It’s the properties that matter. And those haven’t changed. If anything, listening to Tubular Bells further highlights the property of non-orientability:
The song-writing is linear. There is no regular chorus or verse. There is no hook. The music isn’t built on patterns. It isn’t meant to stick in your head. It’s meant to take you on a journey. I personally am a big fan of music like this, but it isn’t for everyone. Even those who are well acquainted with the album (and it is essentially a single 48 minute piece of music) would struggle to describe it to someone else. Much like a mobius strip, and much like the shape on the album cover… there would be no regular/normal/common way to describe it. You could perhaps describe the piece at a moment in time, but doing so wouldn’t bring any clarity to what the piece is like. You just have to be there.
But to be honest with you… Bigelow’s new interview is not what prompted me to write a follow-up to my initial piece on this event. In fact, in a span of 2–3 days (prior to the release of the new Bigelow interview) there were several different conversations involving different people discussing this event. I, being the prolific self-promoter that I am, decided to jump in and post screenshots from my initial piece that summed up my general interpretation/hypothesis. Doing so required me to scroll through my initial post and find the passages I was looking for. Even though it wasn’t what I was looking for, I noticed a quote I had included from Jacques Vallee’s “The Invisible College”. At the time of writing the first post, it felt particularly relevant to the event and what I believed to be going on:
“I propose the hypothesis that there is a control system for human consciousness. I have not determined whether it is natural or spontaneous; whether it is explainable in terms of genetics, of social psychology, or of ordinary phenomena — or if it is artificial in nature, and under the power of some superhuman will. It may be entirely determined by laws that we have not yet discovered. I am led to this hypothesis by the fact that in every instance of the UFO phenomenon I have been able to study in depth I have found as many rational elements as I have absurd ones, and many that I could interpret as friendly and many that seemed hostile. No matter what approach I take, I can never explain more than half of the facts.
This is what tells me that I am working on the wrong level. And so do all the believers, and this definitely includes the skeptics, because they believe they can explain the facts as strongly as the most enthusiastic convert to Ms. Dixon’s vision of Jupiterian Amazons! I would argue they are all wrong, even Puharich with his disappearing tapes, and Uri voicing from Rhombus 4-D.”
This passage caught me by surprise because to be honest I had forgotten that I had even included it. Obviously there is much relevance due to Vallee’s description of the confounding nature of UFO data. However this time, what jumped out to me was something that I hadn’t noticed before. The name of (one of) Uri Geller’s sources for channeled information was… Rhombus 4-D.
Weird Geometry and the 4th Dimension
Upon noticing this I immediately googled “4D rhombus” to see if such a thing actually existed. I had a hunch that perhaps this particular intelligence was using geometry to communicate so it was worth a shot. This is what I found:
From Wikipedia:
“In geometry, the rhombic dodecahedron is a convex polyhedron with 12 congruent rhombic faces. It has 24 edges, and 14 vertices of two types. It is a Catalan solid, and the dual polyhedron of the cuboctahedron.
Being the dual of an Archimedean polyhedron, the rhombic dodecahedron is face-transitive, meaning the symmetry group of the solid acts transitively on the set of faces. In elementary terms, this means that for any two faces A and B there is a rotation or reflection of the solid that leaves it occupying the same region of space while moving face A to face B.“
Now I know less than nothing about math, so I have no idea if this actually represents a 4-Dimensional Rhombus or if such a thing can even exist. I’m hoping that someone much smarter than me will read this and provide better insight. It was at this point that I realized I didn’t even understand what 4D really means. Again from wikipedia:
“4D, meaning the 4 common dimensions, is an important idea in physics referring to three-dimensional space (3D), which adds the dimension of time to the spatial dimensions of length, width, and depth. In geometry, the fourth dimension is related to the other three dimensions by imagining another direction through space; just as the dimension of depth can be added to a square to create a cube, the fourth dimension can be added to a cube to create a tesseract.”
One of the people who was very much involved with early studies into 4th dimensional concepts was… August Mobius:
“In 1827 Möbius realized that a fourth dimension would allow a three-dimensional form to be rotated onto its mirror-image.”
My search for a 4D Mobius Strip yielded the “Klein Bottle”:
“In topology, a branch of mathematics, the Klein bottle (/ˈklaɪn/) is an example of a non-orientable surface; it is a two-dimensional manifold against which a system for determining a normal vector cannot be consistently defined. Informally, it is a one-sided surface which, if traveled upon, could be followed back to the point of origin while flipping the traveler upside down. Other related non-orientable objects include the Möbius strip and the real projective plane. Whereas a Möbius strip is a surface with boundary, a Klein bottle has no boundary [my emphasis]. For comparison, a sphere is an orientable surface with no boundary.
The Klein bottle was first described in 1882 by the German mathematician Felix Klein.”
I can easily imagine Lacatski seeing a shape like this and comparing it to the Album cover for tubular bells. I didn’t search for anything “tubular” but depending on the orientation it certainly seems similar. Maybe Lacatski didn’t see a Mobius strip at all, but a Klein Bottle… or maybe it was something we don’t have a word for yet.
So What’s the Point?
I am not here to argue about Uri Geller, or the significance of whatever channeled information he claimed to receive from Rhombus-4D (who supposedly self-identified as a space-fairing supercomputer, delivering warnings via Geller to protect humanity and avoid planetary-wide destruction). Uri Geller and his associates are highly controversial characters, and channeled information is generally a unique mixture of complete nonsense and accurate information. There has been much ink spilled on the topic and I personally don’t know enough about Geller or his channeled information to have a strong opinion either way. The entire episode may be completely meaningless, and it wouldn’t change what I’m trying to get at here.
What do 4D shapes, channeled-information, non-orientable surfaces and the album tubular bells all have in common? They are CONFOUNDING.
When we experience them, they take us by surprise. They take us to liminal spaces… places of unknowing. They are constantly changing, constantly transitioning from one form to the next. Researchers attempting to document the unexplained occurrences at skinwalker ranch echo a familiar lamentation: the same thing never happens twice. It seems like a game. It has even led some to the conclusion that what exists there is a precognitive non-human intelligence. It knows what you’re thinking. It knows what you’ll do next. It knows how to take you outside of your comfort zone.
If you follow my blog or twitter feed with any regularity (and you shouldn’t), you will know that I don’t like one-size-fits-all answers. While I do think there is a connection between the many seemingly disparate phenomena we find ourselves obsessed with, I don’t think it can all be boiled down to one “thing”, one “who”, one “how”, or even one “why”. That being said, I think we should take note of the effect experiences like these have on us. Is there meaning to be found in the meaningless? Clarity in the confusion? Is the phenomena at SWR operating in a 4th (or higher dimension)?
Mankinds?
I am reminded of Luis Elizondo’s excellent recent interview with Andy McGrillen on “That UFO Podcast”. Where he was asked again about his notable “mankinds” comment made previously in a separate interview:
From Luis Elizondo:
“We live in a three dimensional world where time is a function of the fourth dimension if you will… And we experience time linearly… it’s a linear process. But we now know in the quantum that time… well first of all we know that time because of the work of Einstein and others that space and time are joined together. We know that spacetime is flexible. It’s called relativity. We see it around massive objects all the time… not just earth but the sun, black holes. So… the linear universe that we experience uh… to some degree really isn’t…”
“When you look at the notion of the future people would define the future as those events which have not yet happened, and the past is defined as events that have already happened. And when you look at that construct then the present must be a moment in spacetime, probably measured in planktime- a very infinitesimally small… moment of space time where the future is transitioning into the past. It’s not a point in time… it’s a process… it’s an event that’s occurring… so the way to think about that in lay terms is think of a cigarette or a cigar. The parts of the cigar that have already burned… the ash… is the past. That part of the cigarette or the cigar that has not yet burned is the future. And the cherry… that moment of ignition… that spark of where the future is being consumed and becoming the past… that is the present. We as human beings, we live at that moment. All of our hopes, our fears, our memories, love, hate, good, bad, all that is an expression of an experience that occurs at an infinitesimally small moment of spacetime… like i said probably measured in planktime… That is how we experience the present. But what if there were… things… that had the ability to experience where the present was a much bigger cherry… if you will. A much bigger transition where more elements of the future and the past are experienced… as in the present. Uh… and can do that also physically, right. So it’s not just an idea it’s uh… What if there were species out there that experience the universe with an extra level of dimension. And so you and I are having this conversation now with your audience… and we’re having this conversation right here and right now. But if i were to have the ability to have this conversation right here but five minutes ago, or five minutes from now, we would never meet. We would be like two ships passing in the night. is it possible that maybe some of these things… some of these UAP have the ability that we experience them when they are right here, right now… and every other time we don’t because we’re not intersecting… with that extra-dimensional space of time? You know when you look at that cigarette or cigar burning… you’ll notice that it never burns evenly. When you look at it up close and you can kind of remove a layer from the burn… we realize that there are portions of the future… portions of the cigar… that haven’t burned yet… uh behind portions of the cigar that already has burned. It’s not an even burn. There’s an overlap. And quantum theory is beginning to show some of the models for that. So I know I’m going in a very long-winded and roundabout way to answer your question about “mankinds” but I guess my answer to that is… it’s limitless… [my note— a “Klein Bottle” has no boundaries]”
I also found this interesting video which tries to explain the 4th dimension. Of particular interest to me was the section starting at 1:53 which explains the difficulty (perhaps impossibility) of perceiving 4th dimensional objects from a 3rd dimensional perspective, but the entire video is interesting and I recommend taking 7 minutes to view the whole thing:
Meaning from the Meaningless
On some level I feel that even if my general hypothesis is wrong, and the event at Skinwalker ranch had nothing to do with communication (whether it be shit-talk, self-identification, or just the natural and (un)expected byproduct of 3D people attempting to comprehend 4th dimensional objects) there is some deeper meaning here. For me, falling down this rabbit hole wasn’t about finding a set-in-stone truth. Sometimes by pondering the meaningless you stumble upon hints… little clues about ultimate reality. In this case, I am encouraged to expand my cosmology to include extra dimensions and our interactions with the beings who may inhabit them.
When I look at the tesseract, or the Klein Bottle, what I see is change over time. Right now as I type this I am but a snapshot of myself. Moment to moment I am changing. Millions of cells are dying and replicating. New thoughts are flooding my conscious and subconscious. It feels new and different but perhaps I am becoming what I always have been. Perhaps, like the tesseract, as I grow and shrink I am always returning to myself. In spiral dynamics (which I reference too often if we’re being honest), higher levels of consciousness are marked by the ability to look back at the whole process of personal growth without regret or disdain, or to pity those who are currently experiencing lower levels of consciousness. But ultimately no matter how fast or slow, we are moving, we are growing… in this life, and perhaps the next.
Places of Unknowing
I get “daily meditation” emails from Richard Rohr, who is a Franciscan Friar and prolific author on spirituality. No matter which faith tradition you subscribe to (and even if you subscribe to none), I highly recommend checking out his works. They have had a profound impact on my life and he is, in my opinion, a tremendous source of wisdom. One of this week’s “meditations” shared stanzas from Spanish mystic John of the Cross’ (1542–1591) Poem “Stanzas Concerning an Ecstasy Experienced in High Contemplation”. The Poem speaks directly to the experience of unknowing:
“I entered into unknowing / Yet when I saw myself there / Without knowing where I was / I understood great things / I shall not say what I felt / For I remained in unknowing / Transcending all knowledge.
That perfect knowledge / Was of peace and holiness / Held at no remove / In profound solitude / It was something so secret / That I was left stammering / Transcending all knowledge.
I was so whelmed / So absorbed and withdrawn / That my senses were left / Deprived of all their sensing / And my spirit was given / An understanding while not understanding / Transcending all knowledge.
He who truly arrives there / Cuts free from himself / All that he knew before / Now seems worthless / And his knowledge so soars / That he is left in unknowing / Transcending all knowledge.
This knowledge in unknowing / Is so overwhelming / That wise men disputing / Can never overthrow it / For their knowledge does not reach / To the understanding of not understanding / Transcending all knowledge.
And this supreme knowledge / Is so exalted / That no power of man or learning / Can grasp it / He who masters himself / Will, with knowledge in unknowing / Always be transcending.
And if you should want to hear: / This highest knowledge lies / In the loftiest sense / Of the essence of God / This is a work of His mercy / To leave one without understanding / Transcending all knowledge.”
I find much comfort in these words. What do we stand to lose in the unknowing? Perhaps we have much to gain. It is unlikely that we will unravel all of the mysteries of ultimate reality in our lifetime. In fact, it is possible that within the current snapshot of the totality of our existence, there are some things which are impossible for us to know. Much like a two dimensional being trying to comprehend third dimensional objects, we can only perceive from the perspectives available to us. I think we will learn more… much much more. But don’t waste the unknowing. It is possible that some wisdom can only come from unknowing… that if all is revealed, we will have lost the opportunity to gain something important.
So dialogue with me about this. Do you think it is likely that Lacatski saw a Klein Bottle? Do you think this was a form of communication? Do you ever find meaning in the meaningless?
In part three I discuss a new confounding event at Skinwalker Ranch, how it connects to the extra-dimensional hypothesis, and what it may tell us about The Phenomenon as a whole. Strap in. This is only the beginning.
