Dec 28, 2024 02:46 AM
(This post was last modified: Dec 28, 2024 02:49 AM by Magical Realist.)
"Dear Rachel,
Time is now the same again. I look forward to seeing you again soon, in the far future in the Taiga. The filaments seem to breathe differently.
In the mid-1980s, Kary Mullis was alone on his wooded property in Mendocino County, California when he had an experience that defied all explanation. He said that he, quote, “got spirited away by mysterious beings.” Unquote. It was while driving to this same property that he one time figured out the polymerase chain reaction, a reaction that can copy a DNA strand many times. He later won the Nobel Prize for this in 1993.
One night by himself, he walked out into the woods to use the bathroom. On his way, he saw a raccoon that was glowing.
"I wasn’t frightened. Later, I wondered if it could have been a hologram, projected from God knows where.
The raccoon spoke. “Good evening, doctor,” it said. I said something back, I don’t remember what, probably, “Hello.”
The next thing I remember, it was early in the morning. I was walking along a road uphill from my house. What went through my head as I walked down toward my house was, “What the hell am I doing here?” I had no memory of the night before. I thought maybe I had passed out and spent the night outside. But nights are damp in the summer in Mendocino, and my clothes were dry, and they weren’t dirty."
Mullis said that for a long time after the incident, he was afraid of the place where he saw the raccoon, and he avoided it mostly for several years. Later, he was reading Communion, Whitley Strieber’s 1987 bestseller about being abducted by aliens in upstate New York. Mullis’s daughter called and also recommended he read it. She told him that she had lost a number of hours in the woods on his property too, while her fiancé was searching for her.
In addition, Australian ufo researcher Bill Chalker interviewed Mullis and described how other people also reportedly saw things on Mullis’s property. This included a man who saw the glowing raccoon, ran away from the being, and then encountered a small glowing man who quickly grew into a full-sized man. This was reportedly during Mullis’s party celebrating his Nobel Prize.
But Mullis himself remained skeptical about his experience, and he didn’t attribute it to aliens. He had the abduction experience but not the abduction. He is far too scientifically minded to think that whoever these entities that took him were, they would have any interest in extracting genes. And while he claims to have definitely had the experience, he doesn’t attempt to provide any scientific explanation for it.
"I wouldn’t try to publish a scientific paper about these things, because I can’t do any experiments. I can’t make glowing raccoons appear. I can’t buy them from a scientific supply house to study. I can’t cause myself to be lost again for several hours. But I don’t deny what happened. It’s what science calls anecdotal, because it only happened in a way that you can’t reproduce. But it happened."
One can forgive Mullis for thinking that experience reports like this cannot be studied scientifically. As he specialized in genetics, he would not be familiar with the ways that anecdotes are gathered and studied using folkloristics, as well as using statistical analysis. Studying people’s experience reports is something I discussed a bit in episode two of The Earth, our statement of intent. It’s a topic I’ll certainly return to here.
Had Mullis’s accounts, his daughter’s account, and the accounts of other people on his property, all been documented quickly after the experiences happened, and their claims were investigated and cross-examined, this information could be verified, and analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively against other similar reports. But as with so many reports, there is very limited documentation surrounding them, all dating from a time years after the fact.
Who’s to say any of this actually happened the way that we have it written down? What sort of experience did Mullis really have? And could it have been evidence of some other entities or realm normally inaccessible to humans? Could it have been some experience resulting from the evolution of the human brain to a terrestrial and psychosocial environment over millions of years? Is the explanation some mixture of these? Or is something else going on entirely?
Could Mullis have mistaken what he saw for a raccoon, when in fact it was a tanuki or raccoon dog imported from across the Pacific Rim? Is this glowing raccoon’s and the glowing man’s apparent ability to change shape and kidnap people related to the same characteristics of tanuki, kitsune, other shapeshifting obake spirits in Japan, the Yacuruna in the Amazon Basin, the Phaya Naga in Thailand, or the fairies in Great Britain, for example?
Or was it a similar creature from the traditions of the Yuki or Pomo people, who live in the area where Mullis’s experience occurred? Could all of these separate and very different traditions be related to universal experiences of being abducted by otherworldly entities, expressed in contemporary American narratives as the ufo abduction phenomenon? Do I like to ask lots and lots of very loaded questions?
Who’s to say, Rachel? Who’s to say? Mwahahahaha!
Love
Telesma Blooorb"
https://medium.com/@telesmablooorb/3-5-2...6e513cbf87
Time is now the same again. I look forward to seeing you again soon, in the far future in the Taiga. The filaments seem to breathe differently.
In the mid-1980s, Kary Mullis was alone on his wooded property in Mendocino County, California when he had an experience that defied all explanation. He said that he, quote, “got spirited away by mysterious beings.” Unquote. It was while driving to this same property that he one time figured out the polymerase chain reaction, a reaction that can copy a DNA strand many times. He later won the Nobel Prize for this in 1993.
One night by himself, he walked out into the woods to use the bathroom. On his way, he saw a raccoon that was glowing.
"I wasn’t frightened. Later, I wondered if it could have been a hologram, projected from God knows where.
The raccoon spoke. “Good evening, doctor,” it said. I said something back, I don’t remember what, probably, “Hello.”
The next thing I remember, it was early in the morning. I was walking along a road uphill from my house. What went through my head as I walked down toward my house was, “What the hell am I doing here?” I had no memory of the night before. I thought maybe I had passed out and spent the night outside. But nights are damp in the summer in Mendocino, and my clothes were dry, and they weren’t dirty."
Mullis said that for a long time after the incident, he was afraid of the place where he saw the raccoon, and he avoided it mostly for several years. Later, he was reading Communion, Whitley Strieber’s 1987 bestseller about being abducted by aliens in upstate New York. Mullis’s daughter called and also recommended he read it. She told him that she had lost a number of hours in the woods on his property too, while her fiancé was searching for her.
In addition, Australian ufo researcher Bill Chalker interviewed Mullis and described how other people also reportedly saw things on Mullis’s property. This included a man who saw the glowing raccoon, ran away from the being, and then encountered a small glowing man who quickly grew into a full-sized man. This was reportedly during Mullis’s party celebrating his Nobel Prize.
But Mullis himself remained skeptical about his experience, and he didn’t attribute it to aliens. He had the abduction experience but not the abduction. He is far too scientifically minded to think that whoever these entities that took him were, they would have any interest in extracting genes. And while he claims to have definitely had the experience, he doesn’t attempt to provide any scientific explanation for it.
"I wouldn’t try to publish a scientific paper about these things, because I can’t do any experiments. I can’t make glowing raccoons appear. I can’t buy them from a scientific supply house to study. I can’t cause myself to be lost again for several hours. But I don’t deny what happened. It’s what science calls anecdotal, because it only happened in a way that you can’t reproduce. But it happened."
One can forgive Mullis for thinking that experience reports like this cannot be studied scientifically. As he specialized in genetics, he would not be familiar with the ways that anecdotes are gathered and studied using folkloristics, as well as using statistical analysis. Studying people’s experience reports is something I discussed a bit in episode two of The Earth, our statement of intent. It’s a topic I’ll certainly return to here.
Had Mullis’s accounts, his daughter’s account, and the accounts of other people on his property, all been documented quickly after the experiences happened, and their claims were investigated and cross-examined, this information could be verified, and analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively against other similar reports. But as with so many reports, there is very limited documentation surrounding them, all dating from a time years after the fact.
Who’s to say any of this actually happened the way that we have it written down? What sort of experience did Mullis really have? And could it have been evidence of some other entities or realm normally inaccessible to humans? Could it have been some experience resulting from the evolution of the human brain to a terrestrial and psychosocial environment over millions of years? Is the explanation some mixture of these? Or is something else going on entirely?
Could Mullis have mistaken what he saw for a raccoon, when in fact it was a tanuki or raccoon dog imported from across the Pacific Rim? Is this glowing raccoon’s and the glowing man’s apparent ability to change shape and kidnap people related to the same characteristics of tanuki, kitsune, other shapeshifting obake spirits in Japan, the Yacuruna in the Amazon Basin, the Phaya Naga in Thailand, or the fairies in Great Britain, for example?
Or was it a similar creature from the traditions of the Yuki or Pomo people, who live in the area where Mullis’s experience occurred? Could all of these separate and very different traditions be related to universal experiences of being abducted by otherworldly entities, expressed in contemporary American narratives as the ufo abduction phenomenon? Do I like to ask lots and lots of very loaded questions?
Who’s to say, Rachel? Who’s to say? Mwahahahaha!
Love
Telesma Blooorb"
https://medium.com/@telesmablooorb/3-5-2...6e513cbf87
