The Other Side of Truth

Talking UFOs on Night Fright with Brent Holland

2012-02-01T13:04:00.003-04:00

With a new feature film in pre-production, and new television series work also ramping up for 2012, I haven't had much time to indulge in my interest in the paranormal (or anything else outside of work, for that matter), but just before Christmas last year I taped a couple of episodes of Night Fright with Brent Holland - one on the UFO phenomenon, and the other on ghosts. The one on ghosts hasn't been posted yet, but the one on UFOs is available, so I've posted it here. It's the first time I've done an interview via Skype video, which was fun because you can see the person with whom you're speaking.

Anyway, we discuss some of the cases from my film Best Evidence, as well as Roswell (only because Brent asked), and then some of the things I'm working on with my book (which my real life business has forced onto a temporary back-burner), including the idea of the paranormal as performance art.

The show contains my new favourite one-liner: "I take the UFO phenomenon too seriously to take Roswell seriously."

Enjoy!

Paul Kimball

1957 RB47 case... solved?

2012-01-03T02:19:00.002-04:00

Tim Printy takes a crack at the famous 1957 RB47 UFO incident, which UFO researchers voted as the best case ever in my 2007 film "Best Evidence" (ever since, some people have insisted on referring to this case as "Paul Kimball's" case, which is as amusing to me as it is ridiculous). Note that Printy is careful to state that the case remains unsolved, even as he tries to offer a prosaic explanation for it that stands as a counter-view to the work of people like Brad Sparks and James McDonald.

Interesting reading.

My only quibble with Printy is that this is the second time he has referenced private correspondence between us in his 'zine. Perhaps it's a Canadian vs. American thing, or maybe my folks just raised me different, but to me private correspondence is private correspondence. Anyone who engages Printy along those lines should consider themselves warned.

That said, full credit to him for taking on the case.

Paul Kimball

Introduction to The Other Side of Truth

2012-01-02T23:37:00.000-04:00

Here is the introduction from my book, which I have gone back to calling The Other Side of Truth. It will be available in print in February.

I suspect that the book will please neither believers nor disbelievers. If so, then I will know I have gotten it right.

Paul Kimball

Mully & Sculder Theatre - Groundhog Day

2011-12-24T13:02:00.001-04:00

All "reality" TV has at least some segments that are planned out, if not necessarily scripted in the traditional sense of drama. Ghost Cases was no different, as much as I would have preferred otherwise in a perfect world. I made sure that the planned bits were only used in linking segments between stuff that really happened.

Lest you think it's easy to do this kind of thing, here are some outtakes from one episode where Holly and I just can't quite seem to get it right (although we finally got something useable).

Happy Christmas!

Paul Kimball

Beyond the Fourth Wall

2011-12-18T01:45:00.001-04:00

I've changed the title to my upcoming book, from The Other Side of Truth to Beyond the Fourth Wall: The Art of the Paranormal, and its Relationship with the Human Condition. The book is in final revisions, and will be available in early February. The foreward is being written by my good friend Greg Bishop. Stay tuned for details.

Above is one of the photos from the book - Holly Stevens and I on a "ghost" investigation in 2009.

Paul Kimball

Talking about the Paranormal (and Ghosts in particular) at Hal-Con 2011

2011-11-19T18:16:00.000-04:00

Just a short note for those who may be interested, I gave a lecture at Hal-Con 2011 last weekend, and Suzie Ridler, who was in attendance, has posted a report about it, including some photos and video. It was a packed room, and we had a great discussion. I look forward to doing it again next year.

Paul Kimball

The Other Side of Truth

2011-11-12T03:43:00.002-04:00

My new book, coming in January, 2012. It's in the final revision stage now.

Now, back to silent running...

Paul Kimball

Stuart Miller - R.I.P.

2011-08-18T18:14:00.009-03:00

Stuart Miller

I thought about posting this news at my new blog, but decided that I should post it here, on what was always a UFO-centered blog. Sadly, this kind of information is the only reason I would post here again.

The terrible news that came to me today, via Nick Redfern, is that our good friend Stuart Miller, former publisher of UFO Review (you can find a link to an old issue here) and Alien Worlds Magazine, and long-time contributor to UFO Updates and Errol Bruce-Knapp's radio show Strange Days Indeed, was killed in a tragic motorcycle accident in May.

Stuart and I at his home in Altrincham, UK - 2006

Stuart was one of the truly good guys in ufology. I had corresponded with him for a number of years prior to 2006, when he invited me to speak at a UFO Conference that he was holding in Altrincham (you can read a local news article on it here). Nick was going to be there as well, and I was headed to the United Kingdom to interview Nick Pope in London for my documentary Best Evidence, so I thought it sounded like a great idea. The problem was that Stuart couldn't pay me, which was fine (I've never taken a speaker's fee), but Best Evidence was on a tight budget, and my cameraman Findlay Muir and I had no place to stay in the Manchester area. No problem, said Stuart - we could stay with him, along with Nick and his wife Dana. And so we did, for several days after the conference was over, and had a grand time. It was at that conference back in 2006 that I met my good mate, Dave Sadler, with whom I went ghost hunting in 2009 in the Manchester area for Ghost Cases.

Stuart and Nick on Stuart's patio - 2006.

While I was at his house, I thought it would be fun to interview Stuart for Best Evidence. It didn't make the final cut, but I posted a transcript of it here a couple of years ago. In the introduction to that post, I wrote:

Stuart makes a great cup of tea (or sometimes a vat, if he’s using one of his super-sized cups), he probably knows more about motorcycles than anyone in ufology, he has a lovely family, a very friendly dog named Molly, and he enjoys his stogies. He is articulate, knowledgeable, and opinionated, which always makes for a good interview.

If I have a problem with Stuart, it’s that he's too modest (all of it genuine) about his own role in ufology. UFO Review is one of the best places to go for a comprehensive summary of the news of the day in the world of the paranormal, and his bi-monthly e-zine of the same name, which usually exceeds a hundred pages of content, is a must-read. His monthly UK reports on the Strange Days… Indeed radio show are always a good listen, and he’s to be commended for having the guts to put on a UFO conference at a time when attendance for conferences is down across the board. In short, he’s an important person within ufology, and makes, in his own way, a very significant and worthwhile contribution.

I later posted a clip from that interview, wherein Stuart discussed the Rendlesham Forest case (the clip also features Stan Friedman, Nick Pope, and Dick Hall, another good friend who passed away in 2009).

There is so much I could say about Stuart, with whom I was supposed to have lunch in 2009 when I was in the Manchester area shooting Ghost Cases. He was super keen to get together, but I just couldn't quite find the time, busy as I was filming, something I regretted then, and regret even more now. Time is the one thing you can never get back.

Stuart's great mag Alien Worlds, for which I wrote.

Sadly, he could only keep it going for 4 issues.

I'll leave you with my fondest memory of Stuart.

I was at the Conference, and things weren't going well. The English football team was playing that day in the 2006 World Cup, which meant that Stuart's timing couldn't have been worse. Looking around the room, I could tell that with only 15 to 20 paying customers, he was going to lose money... probably a fair bit of money. I felt bad for him, so while one of the speakers was giving his lecture, I sidled up to Stuart, who was standing next to the refreshment counter / bar, watching the man speak. It was perhaps 11 am.

"Tough sledding," I said. Trying to buck up his spirits, I added: "I bet there'll be more people here in the afternoon."

He just shook his head. "No," he replied. "There's probably going to be fewer people here by then."

I didn't quite know what to say, so I just stood there with him for a couple of moments, both of us silent. Then he walked behind the bar, poured himself a beer, and then poured another for me. He walked back around to the front of the bar, handed me my beer, smiled, and simply said "Fuck it." Then he took a long drink and laughed, and we both proceeded to have a no-holds barred chat about life, UFOs, and good English beer.

This excerpt from the interview Errol Bruce-Knapp conducted with Stuart, Nick and I later that evening (and it was very late in the UK), sums up the hijinks that we were up to that grand day in Altrincham in May, 2006 - and shows what a wonderful fellow Stuart was (Nick offers his own thoughts on Stuart here; Errol comments here).

Stuart Miller was a genuinely good man, full of joie de vivre, wit, humour, and a true spirit of adventure and humanity. He will be missed by all who were lucky enough to know him.

Paul Kimball

Tea and Happy Trails

2011-07-11T15:43:00.007-03:00

We all spend far too much time on the Internet these days, talking instead of living, pontificating about how things should be, instead of actually doing something to change them.

With respect to the paranormal, as with most things in life, "doing something" means seeking out personal experiences, both your own as an experiencer and those of others for context, and to learn from them. Alas, the lingua franca of the "subject" these days (again, as with most things in our society) is "discussion" of people (i.e. gossip), as opposed to ideas, or events, or cases. Accordingly, I'm putting The Other Side of Truth on indefinite hiatus, until at least this time next year, at which point I'll see where things stand. Maybe the journey will lead me back here (although I sincerely doubt it), but at the moment, and for the forseeable future, to paraphrase Jacques Vallee years ago, I've said all that I care to say in public.

Victoria-by-the-Sea, PEI

A couple of thoughts before I wander off to my metaphorical Walden Pond.

First, for updates on Beyond Best Evidence, which will be my final film about the UFO phenomenon, check out my company's website. You can also view all of the other films I've made about UFOs and the paranormal, including two episodes of Ghost Cases, at the website for free.

Second, the blog will still be here, although I'll be going through it over the next few months and removing a lot of old posts, particularly the ones that relate solely to personalities as opposed to ideas, or cases, or stories. In the end, a more streamlined and relevant version will remain.

The one last piece of advice I will offer is to get out there and live your life, as opposed to living through someone else's. While doing so, make sure to find time for proper Tea, one of the last remaining vestiges of a civilized and cultured society.

The Orient Hotel, Victoria-by-the-Sea, PEI...

... home of Mrs. Proffit's Tea Room!

Tell them I sent you, and make sure to have a scone with clotted cream and jam as well!

In the meantime, you can follow some of my ongoing adventures, interests and opinions, totally unrelated to the paranormal, at Day Tripper and The Philosopher King, should you be interested.

Happy trails,
Paul Kimball

Priorities

2011-07-11T00:05:00.003-03:00

There is apparently much chatter as of late (on various blogs, and podcasts - the usual suspects) about a UFO researcher, and claims that he made up phony academic credentials. In the grand scheme of things (even "ufological" things), it is really much ado about nothing. But people these days love to talk about personalities, because it's the great leveler - you don't need a degree, or any qualifications whatsoever, to gossip, or attack people, or pile on. You barely need a pulse.

Meanwhile, I decided to "get away from it all" this weekend, and took a trip to Prince Edward Island with an old and dear friend.

Some things matter... and some things don't.

Did the UFO researcher currently under fire fake his credentials? It seems like he did.

Does it make much of a difference? No, not really, other than to him and those who worked with him.

What of any significance is left to discuss, once the lie has been exposed? Nothing.

Will it help solve the UFO enigma? Absolutely not. It's a sideshow.

It's all about having your priorities in order, folks.

Paul Kimball

Change, the Future and the ETH

2011-07-07T14:45:00.001-03:00

When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BCE, sparking the civil war which led to the ultimate replacement of the Roman Republic with the Roman Empire, it was on horseback, leading his legions of soldiers armed with swords, spears, and other similar weapons.

When the Roman Empire in the West fell in 476 CE, after five centuries as the pre-eminent power in the ancient world, it was to Germanic armies that wielded more or less the same equipment as Caesar's legions had. When Belisarius re-captured large parts of the Western Empire in the middle of the 6th century for Emperor Justinian, he too led armies that would not have seemed unfamiliar to Caesar.

Belisarius

Thus, while there were certainly changes in tactics, and formations, and even to some degree materiel, the armies led by Belisarius looked much like the armies led by Caesar six centuries earlier. There was no fundamental difference.

The same cannot be said for developments in the 20th century. Admiral Jellicoe's Grand Fleet, the foundation of British Imperial might in 1914, and the victor at the Battle of Jutland in 1916, was irrelevant by the time the Second World War ended in 1945. Blockades and great naval battles between surface fleets were meaningless when compared with first with air power, as demonstrated by the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse in 1941, much less the development of atomic weapons by the end of the war - all of which came to the fore within less than a decade.

For centuries - indeed, in many respects, for millennia - human development remained relatively stagnant. Change, when it came, was generally slow and fitful.

Contrast that with my home computer. When I founded Redstar Films, just twelve years ago, I bought desktop computers for the office for my home that were near the top of the line, and which were specifically assembled by a local company. They each had 20 GB of hard drive space. The mass produced computer I'm using as I type this has 300 GB of hard drive space, and is hooked up to a separate drive that contains 500 GB of space. On the shelf nearby is another drive with a TB of space. I can edit an entire film on this computer, and post it immediately to various places on the Internet, or send it via FTP to someone in Asia, or Europe.

I could go on, but the point should be clear. Human progress has been accelerating exponentially since the beginning of the 20th century, and in particular since the end of the Second World War, at a rate that makes all of human history before then look like the slow crawl of an infant. And we haven't even really gotten started yet.

So, on the one hand, when I hear someone like Michio Kaku say that travel to the stars is far beyond our capabilities right now, and that any civilization which would have figured out how to do it must be much more advanced than us, I have to agree. It's common sense. The problem, however, comes with the timeline that he (and others) then impose for the development of that technology - not just decades, or even centuries, but millennia.

The problem is that Kaku et al assume a rate of progress for any civilization similar to human progress prior to the Twentieth Century - that is to say, slow and in fits and starts. They assume that, like Belisarius compared to Caesar, astronauts in six hundred years will more or less be using the same technology that astronauts today are using. But that doesn't seem to be the way that our development is trending. The predictive models of the past are no longer relevant.

It's possible that they're right, of course. It might even be likely. But given the way that things have gone, and are going, it cannot be said that they are certainly correct. The technological developments necessary to get us to the stars may not be thousands of years away - they may only be hundreds of years away, or perhaps even less. We just don't know anymore.

Predicting the future is a tricky thing, made trickier with each passing year.

Accordingly, it's not unreasonable to speculate that a civilization in our nearby "galactic neighborhood" could have developed these abilities before us, and made their way here at some point, without having to imagine them as god-like beings so far in advance of us that we would not be able to recognize them, or communicate with them.

That may well be the case, but it's worth remembering that it may not.

Paul Kimball

Unified Field Radio appearance

2011-07-06T16:19:00.002-03:00

My recent appearance on the Unified Field Radio program with Justin Brown is now available - you can listen in to the episode here. We chatted about Beyond Best Evidence, Best Evidence, ghosts, UFOs, Stan Friedman and the ETH, Mac Tonnies and the cryptoterrestrial hypothesis, and all sorts of other stuff.

The program airs on 88.1 FM (CKDU) in Halifax, Nova Scotia - well worth checking out.

Paul Kimball

Pop Matters: Smiths & Housemartins, "This Charming Caravan"

2011-07-06T10:40:00.001-03:00

Apropos of nothing, really, other than me thinking this is absolutely awesome. My two favourite English bands of the 80s, and two of my favourite songs by them mashed up together.

I'll send this out to good pal and fellow traveler Nick Redfern, who I know is a huge fan of both The Smiths and The Housemartins, and who has just sent me a copy of his new MIB book for review.

See... it's apropos of something after all!

Paul Kimball

Pop Matters: The Northern Pikes, "Unimportant"

2011-07-05T23:48:00.000-03:00

A thought-provoking pop gem from the great Canadian band The Northern Pikes.

No matter how different we may seem to each other in this life, we're all headed for the same end, and a final equality. In our shared "unimportance" lies a recognition of our true humanity - and the beginnings of an awareness of our our real importance.

Paul Kimball

The Morality Pill

2011-07-05T21:28:00.003-03:00

Apropos of Evolving Consciousness, Empathy and Advanced Hon-Human Intelligence, a post I wrote back in late April, there's a thought-provoking opinion piece in today's Globe and Mail that I recommend to everyone - Would We Swallow A Morality Pill, by Guy Kahane, who is deputy director of the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford. Kahane asks the following question: Should we use our growing scientific understanding of the basis of human morality to try to make people morally better?

Here's an excerpt:

It would be ideal if individuals could freely explore different ways to improve themselves, whether by practising mindfulness, reading moral philosophy or, yes, by taking a “morality” pill. But it’s also true that, although some people are eager to take pills that make them feel better, it’s not so obvious that people would want to take pills that would make them morally better. It’s not clear people really want to be morally better. And those who, like the psychopathic Alex [of A Clockwork Orange], need the most help are probably those who would want it least.

Well worth a look, and then consideration, less so for the idea that an actual "morality pill" might be invented than for the question that Kahane leaves the reader with:

"Will we want to take them if they ever become available? And what does it say about us if we won't."

Paul Kimball

Synchronicity

2011-07-04T19:28:00.002-03:00

Long before my recent Los Angeles run of what Walter Bosley called "synchronicities", I actually made a performance film for Bravo here in Canada called - you guessed it - Synchronicity. This film featured pianist Heather Schmidt and cellist Shauna Rolston, talking about their friendship and creative collaboration, and performing music written by Schmidt, including a piece I specifically commissioned for the film titled - you guessed it again - "Synchronicity".

In the context of the paranormal, and the possibility of interaction with an advanced non-human intelligence, I think Shauna's comments about communication, and the relationship between the composer and the musician as interpreter, are particularly interesting.

Heather and Shauna also talk about how they "fit together". I always wonder whether these kinds of things are just coincidences, or whether there might be something more at work. Do we just get lucky when we meet people with whom we have a connection, or do we meet these people for a reason? Perhaps, if you give any credence to the idea of reincarnation, we travel through our "lives" linked to the same group of people, each of us fulfilling a different role in the next life (my dad, for example, might be my son or daughter in the next life, or my best pal). Maybe that's why, when you first meet someone and feel like you've known them your whole life, you have - just not this "life", but one before... or, if you see time not as a linear construct but more of a circle, then perhaps a "life" still to come.

That would be the ultimate synchronicity.

Paul Kimball

Friedman on Sagan, NASA, Project Blue Book, space exploration

2011-07-04T09:36:00.000-03:00

Over the past couple of years, I posted several clips from a pre-interview I conducted with Stan Friedman in 2000 (while researching the documentary Stanton T. Friedman is Real), but I finally got around to putting them all into one video this past weekend.

Stan discusses a number of subjects, including Carl Sagan, Project Blue Book, space travel, and NASA.

Paul Kimball

Canada Day

2011-07-01T07:48:00.000-03:00

In honour of Canada Day, here I am in 1990 proudly wearing the uniform of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, while stationed at Ingonish Beach, Nova Scotia.

Paul Kimball

Denise Djokic: Seven Days, Seven Nights

2011-06-28T13:44:00.001-03:00

Of all the films that I've done over the years, my 2002 documentary on Canadian cellist Denise Djokic and her tour through northern British Columbia with pianist David Jalbert remains my favourite.

Everytime people like Denise and David play, I think they're opening a doorway to a better world... and perhaps a different world, and the "other" that may inhabit it.

Paul Kimball

Merci beaucoup

2011-06-28T02:45:00.001-03:00

Zorgrot and I at Rendlesham filming Best Evidence, May 2006.

Sometime today, the statcounter that measures the unique viewers that this blog has had over the years will turn over on 600,000. Zorgrot and I just want to take a moment to say thanks for popping by at some point since I began The Other Side of Truth back in 2005.

Paul Kimball

Filmmaking 101, Vol. I

2011-06-28T02:30:00.004-03:00

Nobody knows how hard it is to get a feature film funded, and then made, more than I do (apropos of Eternal Kiss, which will be an entire chapter someday in my autobiography). In that light, I present the following to you for your consideration:

Of course, this has nothing to do with the paranormal, so just file it under "life and how to live it", and then check out Jeremy Vaeni's Kickstarter page for his film Free Space, and consider making a contribution.

Paul Kimball

The Visions of William Blake

2011-06-27T05:03:00.003-03:00

William Blake's "The Ghost of a Flea"

Astrologer and artist John Varley reported that his friend William Blake, who had experienced visions since his childhood, once had a vision of a ghost of a flea at a seance the two held in 1819. According to Varley:

As I was anxious to make the most correct investigation in my power, of the truth of these visions, on hearing of this spiritual apparition of a Flea, I asked him if he could draw for me the resemblance of what he saw: he instantly said, 'I see him now before me.' I therefore gave him paper and a pencil with which he drew the portrait... I felt convinced by his mode of proceeding, that he had a real image before him, for he left off, and began on another part of the paper, to make a separate drawing of the mouth of the Flea, which the spirit having opened, he was prevented from proceeding with the first sketch, till he had closed it.

I highly recommend this New York Times article from 1910 about Blake, his visions and the art that he created as a result. As the Times notes, "Whatever guess we make at the mighty puzzle of this power of vision, one thing is certain. Blake would have been a pale and ineffectual artist without it, and with it he contributed a poignant and enduring force to art."

One can only wonder what kind of diagnosis (and then treatment) a psychiatrist would make today were he confronted with someone like Blake, and the visions that he described. Fortunately, Blake lived in a time well before our modern world of corporatized and commercialized conformity, and was therefore able to use his visions - whatever might have caused them - as the inspiration for his art, his poetry and his philosophy, all work that remains hugely influential to this day.

If there is an "other", advanced non-human intelligence, then I suspect that this is how it communicates with us - through visions. If this is the case, then I believe that we would all have the ability to receive that communication, in some form or another, but that the vast majority of us do not have the willingness to access that ability, largely because we're afraid of what it might represent, namely a loss of control. We want to "fit in" to society as it is structured around us (the ultimate control mechanism), but by fitting in we may be missing out on something far more important, and meaningful - the ability to truly be free.

Paul Kimball

Kaku on UFOs

2011-06-26T23:19:00.005-03:00

There's nothing new in this clip of Kaku being interviewed on MSNBC last year, but still it provides a good, short summarization of his views on the UFO phenomenon.

Paul Kimball

Within the Fire, You Find the Rain

2011-06-25T11:16:00.011-03:00

Back in the 1990s, when I was in law school, and then a musician (and also in grad school), my best friend Peter Black and I used to drink "on occasion", during which time would discuss all things metaphysical, mystical and philosophical (we still do this, but far less frequently, alas). I wrote a song about our otherworldly conversations, called "A Drawing Down" (the title came from a line in the Wilfred Owen poem "Anthem for Doomed Youth"), and our view that society (and most of the people within it) had become hollow, too wrapped up in bread & circuses, and lacking a meaningful direction, or awareness of a "bigger" picture. Peter and I weren't particularly settled on what that "bigger" picture should or could be, only that people should be looking for it in places other than those deemed socially acceptable by the powers-that-be, and that there was no one answer, or path, that people should follow - rather, there were parts of almost every path that could lead to insight and form part of the greater whole.

Accordingly, the conversation would range from Marxism to Christian mysticism to Aleister Crowley, and many points in between, off to the side, and over the proverbial fence. From time to time, we would light a little fire in the center of the room and try to commune with the elder gods, should they exist in some form and still be in the practice of accepting calls. To this day, I'm not sure that we ever got an answer, although we did have a pretty strange experience with a ouija board once, but I am sure that one should never attempt to put out a fire in the middle of a room with a glass full of vodka. I definitely consider that a bullet dodged!

Anyway, here are two versions of that song by my old band, Julia's Rain - the first is the original, harder-edged version (which we eventually released on an e.p. called "notes from underground"), while the second is a jazzier, more acoustic version taht we played at a live fundrasiing gig for radio station CKDU.

The lyrics were:

I read the news today -
I really thought it would mean something to me,
but stranger tales, well I have heard
nothing that happens seems to make me anymore,
just round and round it goes
through my revolving door.

I heard a song today -
I really thought it would mean something to me,
but truer songs, well I have heard
nothing they write seems to touch me anymore,
just the words going in and out
through my revolving door.

Candles burning on the floor
and Aleister Crowley is knocking at my door,
come around, come around
to this drawing down,
on this "unholy" ground
come see what I have found.

I heard a voice today -
I really thought it would mean something to me,
but stronger voices, well I have heard
nothing they say seems to move me anymore,
just the Word going in and out
through my revolving door.

I wasn't the only one drawing upon a wide variety of literary influences for musical inspiration back then, however. Another of my best friends, John Rosborough, fronted a band called The Fourth Wall, with whom my various bands played frequently, and like me he looked to the Beats and mystics for inspiration, as well as philosophers and poets such as William Blake. Beltane Born, the title of the band's one full-length CD release, also gives a hint to some of the more mystical elements of John's writing.

John and I on a shoot in northern British Columbia, 2002.

Like me, John now works in the film & television industry here in Halifax, as a producer / director / writer, and from time to time he still plays with The Fourth Wall. You can find their website and some of their music here - I recommend "The Wizard" in particular, wherein John writes, "What do you want to be now, what do you want to see now?"

John Rosborough playing with The Fourth Wall.

With Peter, John and I, it has never been about coming up with "the answer" - rather, it's been about asking as many questions as possible, because none of us think there's just one "answer". We've always been looking for "the other side of truth", cognizant that it's the journey that really is the destination. It's been a journey that has taken us all to some strange places (in the case of Peter and I, usually a cemetery late at night). I could relate the story of how John and I were almost eaten by a bear in the wilds of northern British Columbia (a personal favourite for the sheer absurdity of it), but I prefer the story of a night out in San Juan, Puerto Rico, whilst filming "Fields of Fear" back in 2006.

John with Nick Redfern and researcher Orlando Pla
on location in rural Puerto Rico, 2006.

The rest of the crew had settled into the hotel for the evening (along with Nick Redfern, who had gotten ill from a tuna salad sandwich he had eaten in Mayaguez earlier that day), while John and I headed out into old town, where we moved from small bar to small bar, and wandered down the dimly lit streets with no real purpose other than curiosity. I remember walking down one street, and realizing that John had stopped to look down an alleyway. I motioned him to leep going, but he said "have a look." I did, and down that alley was some sort of house party going on. He suggested we wander down and have a look... so we did. I won't relate the rest of the night's adventures, in the interests of maintaining a PG friendly readership, other than to say that we should all be willing to just head down the alleyways of life and see what we find there.

As Blake wrote: "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom; for we never know what is enough until we know what is more than enough."

That journey continues tonight for John and I at a local watering hole, where we will no doubt be talking about James and Kerouac and Bukowski, the elder gods, and life and how to live it. As he wrote in the Fourth Wall song "Find the Rain":

"within the fire, you find the rain."

The Psychedelic Furs - Heaven

.:Çésar:.™® | Myspace Video

Let it rain.

Paul Kimball

A Great Link

2011-06-25T08:05:00.000-03:00

American biologist Craig Venter is best known for his key roles in being part of the team that sequenced the human genome, and in 2010 for announcing that a team led by him had created the first self-replicating synthetic life, by synthesizing a very long DNA molecule containing an entire bacterium genome, and introducing this into another cell.

He's also a man who has previously expressed an interest in extraterrestrial life.

So it should probably come as no surprise that he seems to be interested in combining the two. DARPA has just announced the 100 Year Spaceship Program, a blue-sky project which aims to enable a manned journey between the stars sometime in the next century or so. One of the proposals that has been floated, and is receiving a notice in virtually all of the press articles about the project, is Venter's notion of reconstituting humans from genomes launched into outer space.

Now, this is a very, very small program (the award for the best idea to carry forward is only $500,000, a drop in the bucket of military-industrial-scientific research), but this is the kind of thing that can stir the private sector to go far further, because it gives the whole idea an air of intellectual legitimacy. One can also assume that if this is what DARPA is willing to discuss publicly, then privately they are already working away on all sorts of ideas along this line. Any number of other government agencies are probably doing the same thing.

That's all beside the point for me, however. My "take away" from this news, and in particular Venter's idea, is that is we can imagine doing it, and leading scientists and entrepreneurs take the ideas seriously, then we should also consider the possibility that someone else, "out there", has also imagined all of these possibilities... and then actually made some of them happen.

Which leads one to consider Venter's idea, perhaps the most interesting of them all. If we can imagine seeding other worlds with the human genome, and reconstituting the human race there (a plan which obviates the need to worry about how to get there, because we could someday send thousands of ships at subluminal speeds throughout our galactic neighborhood, without needing to be concerned about how long it would take to get to distant worlds), then perhaps "we" already have - if not quite in a galaxy "far far away", then on a world "far far way".

In Canada, we all look to other parts of our world for our ancestors, whether it be England, Scotland, Germany, Italy, India, or if you go back far enough for the aboriginals, Asia. But what if we could all look somewhere else for our true ancestors - to the stars? What if billions of years ago, a quirky group of blue-sky human dreamers somewhere else in our galaxy (or even another galaxy, if we go back far enough), came up with the same idea that Venter has come up with... and then actually made it work?

And so perhaps here we are, getting ready not to travel to the stars for the first time and as a unique species, but rather getting ready to continue the journey that the human race began long ago, a link in a great, never-ending chain of life.

Paul Kimball

Art and Opening the Barriers to Communication

2011-06-24T09:20:00.001-03:00

From Stephanie Steele, a wonderful Nova Scotia artist and Facebook friend of mine, a series called "... the stars land?" that I quite like.

As Greg Bishop and I have discussed more than once (particularly in the "Nothing but flowers..." episode of The Other Side of Truth podcast embedded below), art and music have the unparalleled potential to transcend the barriers to true communication that language and culture impose on us.

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Here's another example of Stephanie's work that I really like, and that "speaks" to me as a disciple of Kerouac and Bukowski and the rest of the "Beats"...

As always with art, what it says to me might not be the same thing as what it says to you, because the conversation that art and music inspires in people is the most important one of all - the conversation that we have with ourselves. This is why I consider art, in all its myriad forms, to be the highest of callings in a world desperately in need of real communication, and a new Enlightenment.

Paul Kimball

Brainwashed

2011-06-24T02:33:00.003-03:00

Completing the week of George Harrison songs is the title track from his final album, Brainwashed, which was released in 2002, a year after Harrison passed away.

Harrison included a passage from How to Know God: The Yoga Aphormisms of Patanjali that I've always thought was fitting, and a nice summary of everything that Harrison stood for, and wrote about.

The soul does not love. It is love itself
It does not exist. It is existence itself
It does not know. It is knowledge itself

I'm not a practioner of yoga, but I do my best to adhere to the precepts set out by Henry David Thoreau in Walden, particularly with the respect of finding moments in every day to be with yourself and your thoughts, in order to discover and stay in touch with who you really are.

We've all been brainwashed by a society that has fetishized things instead of promoting thought. The only one who can set you free from it is yourself.

It's a theme I addressed in my own way, in my own songs, years ago. One of them was called "Turned", which warned of what was coming if we didn't change our way of looking at things.

We are the revolution that we need, and it begins not in the streets, but in the mind, and the heart.

Paul Kimball

Devil's Radio

2011-06-23T01:12:00.001-03:00

Here's a Harrison song from the great Cloud Nine album which is apropos of anonymous posters on Internet message boards and forums, which has been the death of any hope for civil and rational discourse there. Just as bad are the many podcasts and blogs which waste their time talking about personalities as opposed to real issues and mysteries. I regret being a part of it at times over the years.

From this point forward, I will no longer comment on other people in terms of who they are, or what they might have said about me or anyone else. I don't care about hoaxers, or self-proclaimed gurus, or bad apples, or anything else. That's all irrelevant.

There's too many important things to talk about to waste one's time with the devil's radio.

Paul Kimball

Mac Thoughts, Vol. I

2011-06-22T11:27:00.001-03:00

One of my favourite photos of Mac, with my friend Veronica Reynolds in 2006 when we were all in Santa Ana, California - Mac and I working on Best Evidence, and Veronica studying acting in Los Angeles. Thanks to social butterfly Veronica, we wound up at a wedding "after party" that evening, which went on until the wee hours of the morning. Mac and I ended up in a room with some of the guys in the wedding party having a conversation about kung fu movies, and then time travel.

There isn't a day that goes by that I don't think of Mac Tonnies, at least in passing. On some days, however, in different ways and for different reasons, I think of him more than others. I've decided that on those days I'm going to delve back into areas of Mac's work that I found particularly interesting over the years, and post snippets of it here. Call them "Mac Thoughts".

Today is one of those days, so...

From January 31, 2003, at Posthuman Blues:

Mainstream SETI avoids another unsettling possibility: that some extraterrestrial radio transmissions may not be signals at all, but templates for actual alien personae. If it's possible to place a self-replicating automated probe in another star system, it could be used as a receiver as well as an observation instrument. Neurologically inclined aliens could "upload" themselves into a computational substrate and "fax" themselves to the distant receiver at the speed of light.

This concept, which Mac continued to be intrigued by until the end of his life, later became the core story for the play Doing Time, which is now a screenplay in development titled The Icarus Imperative.

Of course, no instalment of "Mac Thoughts" will be complete without a musical selection that both he and I enjoyed. Today, a little REM.

"Everyone here comes from somewhere."

I like to think that someone like Mac winds up somewhere, too.

Paul Kimball

Then and Now

2011-06-22T07:54:00.005-03:00

In 1992, my first band Tall Poppies released an e.p. on cassette (back when people still did that), and followed it up with some local media appearances, including this one on CKDU FM, where we chatted and played a number of songs live in the studio, including "Shadows Grows", one of the earliest songs I co-wrote with my old pal Glenn MacCulloch, the band's drummer. I've always really liked the lyrics, in particular a couple of lines that I came up with which have always reflected my general point of view on any number of things.

"The hands of time slip through the day / the grass beneath our feet it turns to dust"...

"The wisdom crawls from mind to mouth / to hands that will not feed you inside"

The things I was saying back then are the same things I'm saying now. I just think I said them better back then, even as the way that I apply them has perhaps broadened a bit today. Perhaps it was just the younger me laying signposts for the older me to find once again, years in the future?

I like that idea!

Incidentally, in case anyone ever wondered where the title of this blog came from, it was actually the title of one of my old songs, "The Other Side of Truth", which we first performed with Tall Poppies, and later recorded with my second band, Julia's Rain. An early version can be heard as the third song in this set, from 4:43 onwards.

Save me now, oh strange young girl,
from that which in your blood you know,
I will not do but for tomorrow
neither will I do it alone,
Save me now, oh troublesome God,
from that which in your heart you know,
I will not do but for your mercy
and neither for your heaven...
save me now, oh miracle.

Yes, that is me screaming at the end, and then adding the backing vocals.

Ahh, the good old days...

If I had to pick one line from any of my old songs that seems most apropos today, however, it would be from "Horseshoe Heart", which Tall Poppies recorded on the "fields of addiction" e.p. back in 1993.

Stare softly at this sudden leap of faith
watch as I catch the wind and fly away
no destination, just a landing...

Of course, I always liked "fly through the ring of sins and days" as well. It has a very "paranormal" feel to it, for what was a love song at the time.

But whether then, or now, I've always been fascinated by the idea of time, and timelessness, and how we fit into it all... or perhaps how it fits into us.

Paul Kimball

All Things Must Pass

2011-06-22T05:02:00.002-03:00

Without a doubt, my favourite George Harrison song is "All Things Must Pass", both for the beautiful music, and equally for the beautiful lyrics. Here is a video of Harrison performing it live, with just his acoustic guitar.

Paul McCartney has also performed it as a tribute to his old friend, who passed away in 2001, including this version from the Concert for George in 2002, which also features the other surviving Beatle, Ringo Starr, on drums.

And finally, the album version:

The only thing that is permanent in this world is change. It's how we handle that realization that defines us.

Harrison understood that, as did some of my other favourite writers and philosophers, from different perspectives.

"All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another."

- Anatole France

"Without accepting the fact that everything changes, we cannot find perfect composure. But unfortunately, although it is true, it is difficult for us to accept it. Because we cannot accept the truth of transience, we suffer."

- Shunryu Suzuki

"If you would attain to what you are not yet, you must always be displeased by what you are. For where you are pleased with yourself there you have remained. Keep adding, keep walking, keep advancing."

- Saint Augustine

"Every beginning is a consequence - every beginning ends some thing."

- Paul Valéry

"Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are."

- Bertold Brecht

"Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour."

- Arthur Schopenhauer

My favourite quote about change, however, and our need to accept it - indeed, to embrace it - comes from W. H. Auden's poem "The Age of Anxiety":

"We would rather be ruined than changed;
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die."

What does this all have to do with the paranormal, one might ask? Well, first and foremost, I think that any contact / interaction with an advanced non-human intelligence which might exist is going to require a fundamental change in how we view ourselves, both as individuals and as a collective. But this isn't anything that we should fear. Indeed, we must heed Auden's warning, and climb the cross of the moment when it comes to us.

Harrison framed his song within the context of a break-up with a lover. I would take that metaphor and apply it to the broader picture thusly: the lover who will leave us behind is going to be our illusions about ourselves, and that's always going to be hard for people, just as it's hard when the girl you love leaves you. But that's okay, because there's always someone else out there for you, just as I think that there's something else out there for us.

All things must pass, and then we face another day.

The key is to embrace the change, and make it a better day.

Paul Kimball

Tony Morrill's "Forteania"

2011-06-21T19:34:00.003-03:00

A new-ish blog that I highly recommend is Tony Morrill's Forteania. Morrill, who also writes for Binnall of America, refers to himself (somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I suspect) as a Fortean philosopher, and he covers a wide range of subjects, from UFOs to bigfoot, and all points in between.

In a recent post, Morrill described his modus operandi as follows:

This brings me to where I am at in this stage of my life. I have come to the conclusion, at least temporarily because as a Fortean I am always ready to cast this ideal aside for a better one, that I will just learn what I can from people that are older/wiser in these topics than I am and to share what I learn with whoever is willing to listen. It seems that if there is some kind of 'point' to studying Fortean phenomena; it's simply to allow us the chance to evolve. At least on an individual basis. I know for sure that my life has never been the same since the day that I picked up my first UFO book. I think it's definitely for the better as well.

It's early days for Morrill, but his eclectic approach is a welcome relief from the more parochial blogs and websites that just focus on one aspect of the paranormal, to the exclusion of others.

Morrill gets the "big picture", and in that respect he reminds me a bit of the late Mac Tonnies (pictured above with Veronica Reynolds at the 2006 New Frontiers Symposium), and how he approached things at his blog The Posthuman Blues, at least with respect to the weirdness that seems to surround us. It comes as no surprise that Morrill cites Mac as an influence.

Forteania is well worth a look on a regular basis, and you can also follow Morrill on Twitter, where he goes by the handle countduckula.

Now, if only Morrill would reveal that he's a Smiths / Morrissey fan!

Paul Kimball

Isn't It A Pity?

2011-06-21T00:04:00.002-03:00

"Some things take so long

But how do I explain

When not too many people

Can see we're all the same

And because of all their tears

Their eyes can't hope to see

The beauty that surrounds them

Isn't it a pity?"

- George Harrison

One can imagine, if there really is an advanced non-human intelligence that interacts with us, and that has developed into a truly empathic being (or beings / civilization), that they might recommend this song to all of us.

To look at it another way, all that we have to do is look at ourselves as an extraterrestrial civilization would look at us - not as Canadians, or Americans, or Russians, or Iranians, or whatever, but rather as members of the human race, floating through space together on what Carl Sagan famously called this pale blue dot. As Sagan wrote: "There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

Seen from 6.1 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles), Earth appears as a tiny dot

Harrison would have undoubtedly agreed with the sentiment, as evidenced by his songs, even if he framed his views in a spiritual context that Sagan rejected. Two paths, one journey. Unfortunately, most of us don't think of these things as Harrison and Sagan did. Indeed, we rarely think of these things at all.

Isn't it a pity?

Paul Kimball

The Art of Dying

2011-06-20T06:06:00.005-03:00

Paul McCartney is my favourite Beatle, but when it comes to my more existential side, it's George Harrison to whom I usually turn. This week I'm going to post a Harrison song every day, starting with one of my favourites - "The Art of Dying".

I've always had a fascination with death, and what may or may not come afterwards. I think anyone who tells you that they don't think of it is lying. We all do, even if we won't admit it. The central question of human existence is whether this life is "it", and what that means for us, one way or another. For the longest time, the idea that death might really be the end frightened me, but then one day my father said something to me, with his usual blunt common sense, that started me on the path of being free from that fear. "Paul" he said, "it's nothing to worry about, because if there's nothing after this, then you'll never know, will you?" Without knowing it, my Dad was all zen with me at that moment, and it resonated in a way that no sermon about the certainty of a life eternal, ever could. The truth is that we don't know, and we can never know... until we get there. And then, if there is something else, we'll know, and if there isn't... well, we'll still never know. So why be afraid?

Being freed from the fear of death opened the door to an actual consideration of what might lie beyond. I accept that oblivion is certainly a possible outcome, and that's a sobering thought (particularly when the left arm starts to tingle). But I also think that there might be other outcomes. As there's nothing I can do about the prospect of oblivion other than to try to live my life to the fullest, which I do anyway, it's those other possibilities that interest me, and that I explore, because perhaps there are clues in our lives, and the world around us, that might just indicate that there is indeed, as the pop poet Bryan Ferry famously wrote, "more than this".

"It is not more surprising to be born twice than once." - Voltaire

The truth is that we're all dying, each and every day. What lies beyond is unknowable... but it is not unimaginable, and that is a critical difference, because in the imagination lies the true "art of dying"... and the art of living.

Indeed, the two might just be the same thing.

Paul Kimball

Beyond Best Evidence - 24

2011-06-17T03:26:00.001-03:00

The final twenty-four hours of the Indie Go Go fundraising campaign for Beyond Best Evidence are upon us, and while we're well short of our goal (an understatement), we're still plugging away!

Thanks to everyone who has contributed so far, or may contribute in the final hours. Thanks as well to everyone who has plugged the fundraising campaign! Tim Binnall and I are going to make a great film, even if it now takes a bit longer to pull it together. If you want to hear what it's all about, I recommend the current episode of Binnall of America, where Tim and I discuss it at length.

And now, because I'm a huge Paul McCartney fan, I leave you with a favourite song of mine - Macca at his cheekiest.

"Hmm..." some may wonder. "Is Paul trying to convey some hidden message, or deep meaning, or something else, with this selection?"

Nope. It just rocks and rolls, which for me is always more than enough.

Paul Kimball

aka the Mongoose of Ufology

Radio Misterioso... again!!

2011-06-17T02:29:00.004-03:00

I think it may be a first of some sort, but this past Sunday, for the second straight week, I was the guest on Radio Misterioso with my good pal and fellow traveler Greg Bishop (the week before I had joined him in studio in Los Angeles, along with Walter Bosley).

Here is how Greg describes the episode (listen to it here - note that the audio is a bit crackly at times, probably due to a bad Skype connection):

Coincidences and Commentary – Paul Kimball Returns

Posted on June 16, 2011 by Walter texted that he wouldn’t be able to show up last Sunday, but I was out in the desert all day (above it actually) without my phone and didn’t get the message. Two rare recordings about Contactees later, I was on the line with Paul Kimball, asking him to help me out with some conversation. Since this program is about conversation and ideas first, and personalities second (actually that’s probably far down the list) I didn’t mind that Paul was on for the second week in a row. We brought up synchronicity, perception, and coincidence again, and moved on to other topics that interest us, such as movies and TV, as well as the ubiquitous paranormal mish-mosh.

Paul also addressed those who think that he’s gone all new-agey. He says he’s just revealing the non-public side of his personality, but I think he’s actually tired of pointing out what’s wrong with UFO study and ready to discuss the positive. What interests him personally now comes first. Like others in the field, he’s decided to (mostly) ignore the petty squabbles and look for personal meaning in the mysteries.

I think that’s the best that any of us can do right now.

The week before we included pop music by the Rural Alberta Advantage and the Smiths (when I hijacked the show), while in this episode we went in a classic country & western direction, with songs like "Streets of Laredo" and "Big Iron", which were the kind of songs I grew up listening to as a kid from my Dad's 8-track collection.

In terms of commentary and discussion, the week before featured me reading from Charles Bukowski, while this episode features me reading from Paul Tillich... because that's how I roll!

Greg and I driving in LA, 2009.

The show is eclectic, that's for sure, but that's what I love most about Radio Misterioso - Greg lets his guests riff on whatever they want to riff on, and then Greg riffs on whatever he wants to riff on. It's less a "talk show" than it is a rambling, but always interesting, thought experiment...

... which is definitely a good thing!

Paul Kimball

Ghost Cases - The Case of the Haunted Graveyard

2011-06-16T21:34:00.002-03:00

Here is the eighth episode of the Redstar Films / Clerisy Entertainment documentary series Ghost Cases, which ran on EastLink TV in Canada in 2009-2010, and has now been sold to True Vision in Thailand. This episode was filmed in Shocklach, England, and features my good pals, Dave Sadler and Steve Mera of the Unknown Phenomena Investigation Association (UPIA).

I've discussed this case several times since on the radio, most recently on Jim Harold's Paranormal Podcast, where I said it was the weirdest / spookiest episode of the entire series... because it was!

Paul Kimball

Pop Matters: a-ha, "Minor Earth Major Sky"

2011-06-16T20:06:00.000-03:00

The title track from the a-ha album, Minor Earth Major Sky, released in 2000.

Despite being remembered in some quarters as a one-hit wonder of the 1980s for the mega hit "Take on Me", which was also a groundbreaking music video, a-ha has been releasing compelling pop music, with interesting and thought-provoking themes about the human condition, for almost three decades now. I was lucky enough to see them live at the height of their fame, in Glasgow, in 1988, and I've remained an admirer of their work to this day.

Here's a wonderful live version, from last year.

Bach is great... but pop matters too!

Paul Kimball

Major Tom and Contact

2011-06-16T15:31:00.001-03:00

And now, having spread doom and gloom with respect to the prospect of disclosure / contact with an advanced non-human intelligence by humanity as a group, let's take a look at what I think is far more likely, indeed, what has probably been happening throughout human history - contact with individuals who are ready for it.

As always, this kind of analysis is best presented by puppets and 80s pop music - Peter Schilling's hit Major Tom (Coming Home), as imagined by Fluff & Such puppetry:

Frankly, this one song and video tells us more about what might be waiting for us than 60 years of books and videos about UFOs and the paranormal... or 2,000 years of priests and preachers standing in a pulpit.

Paul Kimball

P.S. Here are a couple of non-puppet versions.

In German:

The original video in English:

Finally, an interesting video that uses images from Stanley Kubrick's classic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey:

After Disclosure - Update 16/06/11

2011-06-16T03:51:00.004-03:00

So... there's a hockey game in Vancouver (7th and deciding game of the Stanley Cup finals), and the home team loses, and rioting breaks out in the city.

Clearly, humanity is ready for "disclosure" or "contact".

Paul Kimball

"Denis" - a short film

2011-06-15T17:12:00.002-03:00

Denis is a short animated film by some young Halifax filmmakers / animators, including Jullian Reynolds, the son of my good friend, Veronica Reynolds, that touches on the difference between the society that we have built for ourselves, and the one that we need to build for ourselves.

Paul Kimball

Carl Jung: Matter of Heart - documentary

2011-06-15T03:31:00.000-03:00

Matter of Heart is a very interesting 1986 documentary about Carl Jung, that examines his life and times, but more importantly his ideas, particularly about the collective unconscious, often with a mystical bent that was characteristic of Jung's work. The film consists largely of reminiscences and insights by many of Jung's former pupils, friends and colleagues, as well as some footage of Jung himself being interviewed later in his life.

Well worth a look.

Paul Kimball

Scenes from the Front, Vol. III

2011-06-14T17:46:00.001-03:00

Corner of Beverley & Fairfax, Los Angeles - June 2011

“We are a psychic process which we do not control, or only partly direct. Consequently, we cannot have any final judgment about ourselves or our lives.” - Carl Jung

Talking "ghosts" with Jim Harold on the Paranormal Podcast

2011-06-14T00:28:00.001-03:00

Also available this evening is my appearance on the Paranormal Podcast with Jim Harold, where I discuss my experience on Ghost Cases, and the ghost phenomenon in general. You can tune in here.

I enjoy talking with Jim, because he takes a sensible but open-minded approach to the paranormal, just like good pals Tim Binnall and Greg Bishop.

Paul Kimball

Binnall of America - Paul Kimball & Beyond Best Evidence

2011-06-13T20:44:00.001-03:00

I make my return this week to one of my two favourite podcasts, Binnall of America (the other favourite being Radio Misterioso, of course). Here is the description of the episode from Tim:

Full Preview: We kick things off by diving right in to discussion on Beyond Best Evidence, as Paul talks about the 2 month fundraising campaign we have organized and reflects on the process and how things have gone so far. Paul also responds to some specific critics and criticisms of the campaign by explaining more about the origins of the 'crowd sourcing' concept for the film. He then addresses the future of the film, considering the tepid response to the fundraising campaign. Wrapping up the focus on Beyond Best Evidence, Paul then talks about the thematic goals of the film and why it stands apart from the standard cable TV UFO fare.

The conversation then leads to discussion on UFO research, in general, and Paul talks about the 'underground war' between 'Michael Bay Ufology' and the people who are looking at the phenomenon from a different angle. This leads to Paul talking about the paradox and challenges of UFO disclosure that he believes are being ignored by most Ufologists. We then ponder the idea that perhaps the human race, and America in particular, was actually better equipped to deal with the UFO phenomenon back when the modern era started in the late 1940's and 50's. We also examine the issue of Ufology's malaise of recent years and Paul talks about what sort of aspects of the field still excite him.

We then get ultra meta on Ufology and the paranormal by discussing the problems surrounding specialization, trying to understand the unknown, and attempts to win over the mainstream, whether it is science or public interest. Paul then talks about how examining the issue of a non-human intelligence could lead us towards becoming an 'empathic society.' Paul then talks about how people who don't vote don't have a right to complain and draws comparisons from that perspective to the paranormal community, at large.

This leads to some discussion on how some laypeople in the paranormal expect researchers and members of the media to sacrifice their time and money for the 'higher calling' of chasing these mysteries. Going down a different path, we get Paul's take on 2012 and the hype leading up to the big day. Paul ends up discussing Peter Gersten's 2012 suicide plan and the backlash against it from the UFO community. He also talks about how 2012 could allow for personal growth for many people, regardless of what actually happens. In turn, we also examine the question of whether or not the vast majority of people, nowadays, are even capable of that kind of introspection.

Paul also talks about the paradox of perceived power and how the influence of people who create ideas and concepts often outlives the contributions of their contemporaries who wield political power. Given that Paul says this is his last interview regarding Beyond Best Evidence and that BBE will be his last UFO film, we ask the natural question of whether or not this means he is leaving the paranormal behind for good or if he has other plans.

Heading toward the close of the conversation, we break the 4th wall and address the interview, where Paul seemed to talk much more than Binnall, and discuss podcasting, in general. We also talk about where Beyond Best Evidence goes from here, now that the fundraising stage of the project is coming to a close. Wrapping things up, we find out how people can donate to help Beyond Best Evidence get made and things then break down as we talk about BoA:Audio dropping our 'popular' theme music intros as well as the BoA thongs we used to sell when the website first started.

Listen to the full episode here.

As always, great chatting with my good friend Tim, who was doing the podcasting thing before just about anyone else, and thanks to everyone who has contributed to Beyond Best Evidence so far.

Paul Kimball

Do You Think?

2011-06-13T17:23:00.005-03:00

I wrote this song in 1985, in my final year of high school, as a protest against Ronald Reagan's presidency, the state of the world in general, and a call to think about what was happening. We recorded it in 1995 with Julia's Rain, and it was released as the final track on the "wonderful broken silence" CD. I've updated it for the 21st century, with new vocals added to the old... sort of a time travel duet with a younger me... and a President who was even worse and more dangerous than Reagan... (with a guest appearance by his Attorney General, John Ashcroft).

"God and Man", Charles Bridge - June, 2009

It's not just a political song, even though the 2010 version was framed through that lens.

In the end, all that counts for me and you
are the things in this life that we say and we do
do you think, do you care
and how do you sleep at night
do you leave on all of your lights
do you think somehow that everything will be all right...
it's not all right.

Sadly, I think it's more relevant today than it was 25 years ago. I'm sure some might call it all progress. I don't.

It's interesting, at least to me, that "socialism" has such a pejorative connotation in the United States (and to a lesser extent, in Canada) - and "communism" is viewed by most as only slightly less evil than the anti-Christ (and often the two are seen as the same thing). Indeed, a politically right wing UFO researcher asked me last year, while we were both on a radio show together, how I could be a communist (after I had been purposefully tweaking him with some leftist rhetoric, most of which I actually believed, but not all of it). I just looked at him and said, "with the world in the shape its in, the question isn't why someone would be a communist; the question is why someone wouldn't."

And having said that, I recommend this, and this, and say this: labels are so 20th century. The 21st century demands more.

Paul Kimball

Paul Tillich and the Eternal Now

2011-06-13T05:15:00.005-03:00

I made an impromptu guest appearance on Radio Misterioso this evening with my good pal Greg Bishop, and we got into a conversation about time, and timelessness, and consciousness, and the possibility of the existence of an advanced non-human intelligence, all of which led me to reference the idea of "the eternal now", which has been part of Christian theology for centuries, particularly the mystical tradition within Christianity, something I studied at length whilst a graduate student in history. However, in my opinion, the most thoughtful exposition of the concept of an "eternal now" came from the great 20th century philosopher and theologian, Paul Tillich, who I count as one of the primary influences on my own way of thinking. Greg and I discussed his work a bit on the show, in particular his work The Eternal Now, a collection of his sermons, from which I quoted at length. I highly recommend it as a work of profound importance, which should be of interest to anyone who contemplates our place in this universe, and the possibility of contact with an "other"; you can read it here.

The quote that I referenced comes from the end of chapter 11, which deals specifically with the concept of time, and an "eternal now". Here it is:

The mystery of the future and the mystery of the past are united in the mystery of the present. Our time, the time we have, is the time in which we have "presence." But how can we have "presence"? Is not the present moment gone when we think of it? Is not the present the ever-moving boundary line between past and future? But a moving boundary is not a place to stand upon. If nothing were given to us except the "no more" of the past and the "not yet" of the future, we would not have anything. We could not speak of the time that is our time; we would not have "presence."

The mystery is that we have a present; and even more, that we have our future also because we anticipate it in ‘the present; and that we have our past also, because we remember it in the present. In the present our future and our past are ours. But there is no "present" if we think of the never-ending flux of time. The riddle of the present is the deepest of all the riddles of time. Again, there is no answer except from that which comprises all time and lies beyond it -- the eternal. Whenever we say "now" or "today," we stop the flux of time for us. We accept the present and do not care that it is gone in the moment that we accept it. We live in it and it is renewed for us in every new present." This is possible because every moment of time reaches into the eternal. It is the eternal that stops the flux of time for us. It is the eternal "now" which provides for us a temporal "now." We live so long as "it is still today" -- in the words of the letter to the Hebrews. Not everybody, and nobody all the time, is aware of this "eternal now" in the temporal "now." But sometimes it breaks powerfully into our consciousness and gives us the certainty of the eternal, of a dimension of time which cuts into time and gives us our time.

People who are never aware of this dimension lose the possibility of resting in the present. As the letter to the Hebrews describes it, they never enter into the divine rest. They are held by the past and cannot separate themselves from it, or they escape towards the future, unable to rest in the present. They have not entered the eternal rest which stops the flux of time and gives us the blessing of the present. Perhaps this is the most conspicuous characteristic of our period, especially in the western world and particularly in this country. It lacks the courage to accept "presence" because it has lost the dimension of the eternal.

"I am the beginning and the end." This is said to us who live in the bondage of time, who have to face the end, who cannot escape the past, who need a present to stand upon. Each of the modes of time has its peculiar mystery, each of them carries its peculiar anxiety. Each of them drives us to an ultimate question. There is one answer to these questions -- the eternal. There is one power that surpasses the all-consuming power of time -- the eternal: He Who was and is and is to come, the beginning and the end. He gives us forgiveness for what has passed. He gives us courage for what is to come. He gives us rest in His eternal Presence.

Despite what some Biblical literalists might have you believe, Tillich clearly viewed all of this within the Christian tradition, but one does not have to accept that framework to see the merit in the general thoughts that he expressed about the idea of time and timelessness, and how it might affect our interaction with an advanced non-human intelligence that has unlocked the secrets of the "eternal now", i.e. time.

Whether we call it "God", as Tillich did, or whether we call it something else, an examination of "an other" amongst us requires more than just dogmatic scientism, or fundamental religiosity. In the end, it is an existential question, and the answer lies within each of us, and our ability to see beyond the "here and now" and into the "eternal now", in all of its possible manifestations.

Paul Kimball

Scenes from the Front, Vol. II

2011-06-13T05:10:00.006-03:00

At the Great Stupa, Colorado - August, 2008 (with actress Annie Briggs)

"In the sky, there is no distinction of east and west; people create distinctions out of their own minds and then believe them to be true." - Buddha

A Hazy Shade of Winter

2011-06-10T20:55:00.019-03:00

So there I was a year and a half ago, in February, 2010, lying drunk on the Halifax Commons, having fallen on some ice that I hadn't seen in the dark, angry as hell because I had spent the whole evening arguing with a good friend about nothing important (he eventually walked out on me, and even then I didn't really blame him - I was more angry at myself than him), and even angrier because I had landed hard and could already feel the pain shooting up my chest, despite the anesthetizing effect of the dozen or so beers I had consumed.

And then a thought hit me.

I should be dead.

Travel back in time...

It was a cold, clear night in late December, 1985, just after Christmas, and just before New Year's, and I was out driving around Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, with my oldest pal, Colin White. I was older than my years - when I had showed up that fall to register for my first year at Acadia University, I wore a suit and tie. The senior student who checked me into my residence, who introduced himself to me as "Dude", thought I was having a laugh, until my Mom told him that I was serious. I had never had a drink, and I had never kissed a girl. In the case of the former, I was still underage, my dad was a judge, and I didn't want to do anything that would embarrass him; in the case of the latter, it just hadn't been a priority. I was a Reach for the Top star, a straight-A high honours student, a member of my province's National Debating Championship team... I had "better" things to do.

18th birthday, January 1985

So, sure, I seemed like the "Perfect Kid", at least as far as any kid can be "perfect". But the outward appearance of maturity and responsibility belied a profound inner recklessness, born of arrogance. I chafed at the boundaries that I felt the mediocrity of my peers had placed on me, and like many kids before me, I felt I was indestructible. I hardly ever cracked a book at school, because I didn't have to - it all came so naturally to me. My rebellion wasn't flashy, writ in symbolic gestures that showed nothing more than a desire to conform to another system - any idiot can get their ear pierced. My rebellion was inward, and personal, in little ways that no-one saw, and many that no-one recognized.

For example, when you're on the negative side of a debate, all you really have to do is understand the opponents' position (i.e. their "plan"), and then prepare to argue against it. Pretty simple, and deadly dull. Thus, while everyone else was dancing and chatting each other up at the social events at the 1985 High School National Debating Championships in Montreal, I was sitting at a table writing counter-plans on napkins. What's a "counter-plan", you ask? Well, in short, when the team on the negative side of a proposition put forward a counter-plan, they didn't just argue against the affirmative side's plan - they proposed a plan of their own. In doing so, they also then took the burden of proof. It was definitely the harder thing to do, because it required more prep, and my partners thought I was nuts, and it probably cost me a few rankings points at the end of the day, but it was worth it all just to see the other side squirm when they suddenly saw their entire plan become moot, and they had to wing it. People would ask me why I liked counter-plans, and I never really told them the true reason: I did it because it was the only way that I could stay interested in it all, because it was something different, and because I could.

But I digress...

Not all of my rebellion was quite as... "academic" as constructing debating counter-plans - that just happens to be the one I still recall, and care to recount. It often went a lot further than that, in more dangerous ways. But no matter what I did, I had always emerged unscathed. As I said - I thought I was indestructible, and I was arrogant.

So there I was, on that cold and clear night in late December, 1985, in my Dad's Audi 6000, feeling like the King of the World. I gunned it past the speed limit, and headed for an intersection, and took the turn far too fast, and it was as if time had stopped. It didn't, of course, at least not in the real world, but for me, in that moment, it was like an out-of-body experience. I remember laughing and thinking two things - "cool" and "I can beat this".

And then we went over the hill, and I wasn't laughing anymore.

Time travel back even further...

When I was a kid, around eight, nine and ten, I can distinctly remember lying on the couch at home, on several occasions, reading a book, and then suddenly getting a feeling in the pit of my stomach like I was falling from a great height. I could actually feel the wind rushing around me as the velocity increased... and then it would stop.

It wasn't as if I was falling - it felt like I was really falling.

I've been falling ever since.

But I digress again...

Time travel back to 1985...

We were falling over the edge, and we were definitely going down the small hill, sideways and completely out of control, and I remember seeing the tree coming at my side of the car, and then...

Crash.

My head jerked forward suddenly, just as a large branch of the tree smashed through the driver's side window and pushed itself past where my head had been just a second before.

Time travel forward to 2010...

Lying on the Commons, drunk, in pain, angry... and then it hit me, just as it had hit me almost every day since that crash in 1985.

I should be dead.

Somewhere, if there really are alternate universes, I am dead. Somewhere, that tree caught my temple as it crashed through the window.

But not in this reality.

Ever since has been a retreat from the arrogance of my youth. I'm still reckless, and I'm still selfish, and I'm still arrogant. But less so than I was. I'm not sure I'm a better man, but I like to think so. The one thing I am sure of is that I'm a different one than I would have been otherwise.

Because I should be dead... but I'm not. And that realization has made all the difference in the years since, and will continue to make the difference in the years to come.

I'm living on borrowed time, and I need to make it matter. If you Google my name, you'll find pages and pages about the things I've done since 1985. But if you Google the name "Gil Latter", you'll find one thing at the top of the search - the Gil Latter Memorial Award at Mt. Allison University, given in memory of a best friend of Colin and I who died on his way home one day from Sackville, New Brunswick to Dartmouth in a car accident.

I remember getting the phone call from Colin, telling me what had happened, like it was just yesterday. My first thought was a simple one - "damn it, no." After I hung up, I buried my head in my pillow. I wasn't crying - I still haven't cried. Rather, I just wanted to shut the world out, if only for a few moments, and the pillow was the closest thing I had. As I tried to breathe, another thought crowded its way into my mind - "it could have been me... and maybe it should have been me."

Every fall, I drive over to Gil's grave in Dartmouth with a book, sit down next to it, and read for a while. It's always cold, and dreary, but I never feel cold. I always feel warm, and I never feel like I'm alone.

In the end, I like to think that in the alternate universe, their Gil does the same for me.

Paul Kimball

Scenes from the Front, Vol. I

2011-06-10T19:30:00.002-03:00

"The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls, and tenement halls..."

- Paul Simon

Self-portrait, LA Zoo washroom - California, June 2011.

Paul Kimball

Beauty and the Beast

2011-06-10T17:08:00.001-03:00

By any physical standard that our society uses, Natalie Portman is beautiful.

Similarly, by the standards that our society uses, this woman (selected at random from the Internet) is not physically beautiful. If we are to be honest with ourselves, she is not even remotely attractive:

We obviously care about such things. Natalie Portman is a tremendously talented actress, but if she had the same talent but looked like the second woman, would she have the opportunity to pursue an acting career? Unlikely.

But while we care about such things, would an advanced, non-human intelligence care?

What if, for example, such an intelligence was extraterrestrial in nature, and looked like this:

For such a creature, all humans would probably look more or less the same, just as all sperm whales look more or less the same to us.

But we can go even further, and posit that an advanced non-human intelligence is non-corporeal. Perhaps it exists as thought, in a way that we can't imagine (no pun intended)? Perhaps it exists in the physical realm, but not in a way that we can really touch, like a "ball of light".

For such a being, our physical attributes - our conception of what is beautiful, and what is not - wouldn't matter at all.

We would all be "beasts" to them, and if there was a beauty in us for them to find, it would be found elsewhere - in our compassion, perhaps, or our intellect, or our imagination, or our humility.

Until we understand that principle, "contact" will elude us as a society, even as it occurs to those individuals who can see past the superficial notion of beauty that we have created, and find the deeper beauty that exists hidden underneath.

Paul Kimball

A Musical Interlude

2011-06-10T15:55:00.002-03:00

In one sense, Simon was right - we are all, in a sense, leaves on the same tree, working our way through the seasons of this life. Part of the whole, as it were - each one interconnected, even if we can't always see it.

But the more interesting part of the song, perhaps, is the bit about the pebble:

I threw a pebble in a brook
And watched the ripples run away
And they never made a sound.

As I watch this video, I can't help but wonder how many of the people in the audience that day have passed away since then. Each of them, in their own way, threw a pebble in the brook. We might never see where the ripples that the pebble makes wind up (or "hear" the sound they make), but they exist nonetheless. No matter how small, they linger on, even after the pebble has sunk beneath the water.

Paul Kimball

The Open Door

2011-06-10T03:34:00.001-03:00

Someday we will all breathe our last, and in that moment the mythical "equality of opportunity" that we have been sold as the guiding principle of human existence will disappear, to be replaced at last by equality of situation.

Paul Kimball

John Cage - "The Activity of Sound"

2011-06-09T17:40:00.001-03:00

John Cage discusses time and space and the "activity of sound".

Here is 4'33", Cage's most famous - or infamous, depending on your point of view - composition:

Cage: "The sound experience which I prefer to all others is the experience of silence."

And in that silence are we sometimes able to finally, truly hear.

Paul Kimball

Rediscovering the Real World

2011-06-09T17:09:00.002-03:00

Apropos of nothing... and everything.

Paul Kimball

Roswell Solved!!

2011-06-09T15:26:00.000-03:00

Now that I have your attention...

The choice is yours. Join the team and help Tim and I start a new conversation about what the UFO phenomenon might be, and how it might impact us... or keep talking about things like Roswell, and "disclosure", and government cover-ups. As noted in the previous post, about Bergman and Bay, it's the difference between simply being a consumer of a product (and if you don't think Roswell etc. is a "product", then you should probably move along now...), and being a participant in the creation of something new.

"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones." - John Cage

It's up to you.

Paul Kimball

Ingmar Bergman or Michael Bay

2011-06-09T04:55:00.002-03:00

Folks have a choice. They can accept Roswell, conspiracies, crashes, "disclosure", alien abductions, and all of the other "answers" that ufology has to offer, and be happy enough in the familiar comfort of the "same old, same old".

Much like a Michael Bay film.

Or folks can look for something more new, and different, and challenging. A journey of true discovery about ourselves, and the world around us, and the possibilities that this entails.

Like an Ingmar Bergman film.

It's a choice that we all have to make for ourselves, as we decide what's more important - easy "answers", or the truth.

Paul Kimball

Radio Misterioso - Creativity and Synchronicity

2011-06-07T12:08:00.001-03:00

Here's the PG-rated version of this past Sunday's Radio Misterioso show with Greg, Walter Bosley and yours truly. Greg describes it thusly:

RM friend and supporter Paul Kimball returned for a live appearance on June 5th. Walter Bosley was also with us as we talked about our writing projects, the creative process, and tried (without success) to stay away from the UFO subject. The after a few minutes, we seemed to hit a groove and the conversation ranged from Paul’s favorite L.A. authors to the origins of and interaction with non-human intelligence. We also touched on Paul’s opinions of some trends (or lack thereof) in the UFO field. We kept returning to the theme of Kimball’s recent run of coincidences and/ or synchronicities and whether they were purely internal, external or recursive with perceived reality (or all three). Another important theme was the Very Sad Monkey and whether he was actually sad or just having a bad day.

You can listen to the episode here.

Paul Kimball

Kermit, Eternal Kisses & Coincidences

2011-06-07T00:03:00.010-03:00

Today is the last day of my three week long trip to Los Angeles, which has seen a weird run of coincidences, including those I haven't posted here but discussed on Radio Misterioso last night... and then the ones that occurred live on the show. So it's only fitting that today saw the final truly weird coincidence, which was the most personal one of them all.

There has been a group of filmmakers from Halifax here in Los Angeles at a conference over the past couple of days (I'm not involved in the conference), one of whom is my good friend Ben Stevens (the older brother of my Ghost Cases co-host, Holly Stevens). I haven't seen Ben since the fall because he took a gig in Alberta, so we decided to meet up at the Los Angeles Farmer's Market this afternoon, after a morning meeting he had scheduled. We met at noon, had coffee and a nice chat, during which time Greg joined us - he and Ben worked on Eternal Kiss, so they know each other. At 1:45 we headed up to The Grove, because I wanted to get a picture of Lynda Carter, who was being interviewed for a TV show just outside the Barnes & Noble (I'm a fan of her work as Wonder Woman from when I was a kid). She showed up just after 2 pm, I snapped a few photos, and then we wandered off. Greg went back to his house to do some work, and I decided to walk up Fairfax a couple of blocks to show Ben one of my favourite hang-outs, Canter's Deli.

Now, earlier Ben had mentioned that he would like to go up to see the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard if I was game. It's quite a lengthy walk from the Farmer's Market, so he offered to pay for a cab. I had already been to the Walk of Fame with two other pals from Nova Scotia on this trip (actress Christina Cuffari and my brother Jim, both of whom joined me here at different points during my visit), so I was non-committal - one can get too much of a good thing. I also had some work of my own to do back at Greg's house, so I wasn't sure that it was the best use of my time. As we walked up Fairfax, however, and passed Canter's, Ben and I were having such a nice chat that we just kept walking - up to Melrose, and then down, headed towards central Hollywood. Finally, I realized that we were halfway to Hollywood Boulevard (and it was a nice day), so I decided to go all the way - very much a spur of the moment, last second call.

As we continued down Melrose, chatting away as friends do, I stopped paying attention to where we were until I looked up and saw that we were at La Brea, which is a cross street that leads up to Hollywood Boulevard (about ten blocks away). I had never walked up La Brea before, but I knew it intersected with Hollywood Boulevard at the beginning of the Walk of Fame, so we headed up the street towards our destination.

After a few blocks, I noticed a large statue of Kermit the Frog on the top of a building, on the opposite side of the street, which I then recognized as Jim Henson Studios. I had driven past it before, but didn't recall that it was on La Brea. Anyway, as anyone who knows me is aware, I'm a big Kermit the Frog fan, to the point where I have become well known back home for my impression of the legendary Muppet. Indeed, while on set at Eternal Kiss, Ben and I were filmed by another crew member goofing around, and at the end of the short clip, I do my impression of Kermit, at the request of the crew member shooting the footage.

Naturally, I had to get a picture of my favourite frog, something I had never done before in all my trips to Los Angeles, so I stopped, turned, and took the shot.

Now, this is weird, given that video of Ben and I from 2008, and that it was Ben and I who randomly made our way to La Brea today. But then it got even weirder when I glanced down at the sidewalk, something that I had no reason to do - indeed, something that I almost never do.

Of all the people who have seen me do my Kermit impression, none has enjoyed it more than my good friend, actress Veronica Reynolds. She has asked me to do it so many times over the years, both for her and for others, that I have lost count.

And there it was... carved into the cement on the sidewalk exactly where I had stopped to take this Kermit photo.

One name.

Just one.

Again folks, I'm not making this up. You just can't. There was no plan to be there with Ben, at that place, at that moment, taking a picture of Kermit while walking to Hollywood Boulevard (normally you would drive) and then looking down, and seeing that one name.

Amazing.

By the way, referring back to that video of Ben and I goofing around on set on Eternal Kiss, the only video of me ever doing my Kermit impression, there is one more factor. which is the question of how Veronica and I first met. It was years ago, when she auditioned for and was cast in the original, but never-filmed, version of a movie I had written.

Eternal Kiss.

Paul Kimball

Carl Jung and the Modern World

2011-06-06T15:01:00.000-03:00

Carl Jung passed away 50 years ago today. What would he have thought of the modern world? Some interesting and thoughtful speculation on that question by Mark Vernon can be found at the BBC News Magazine website.

An excerpt:

The life of the psyche is crucial. Jung believed it is fed not just by psychology, but better by the great spiritual traditions of our culture, with their subtle stories, sustaining rituals and inspiring dreams. The agnostic West has become detached from these resources.

It is as if people are suffering from "a loss of soul". Too often, the world does not seem to be for us, but against us.

Towards the end of his life, Jung reflected that many - perhaps most - of the people who came to see him were not, fundamentally, mentally ill. They were, rather, searching for meaning.

It is a hard task. "There is no birth of consciousness without pain," he wrote. But it is vital. Without it, human beings lose their way.

Jung's ideas resonate more with each passing year.

As for the "paranormal", he once wrote: "It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves."

Paul Kimball

Radio Misterioso tonight...

2011-06-05T22:28:00.003-03:00

Just a last minute reminder that Greg, Walter and I will be on Radio Misterioso from 11 pm to 1 am-ish EST this evening, live from Los Angeles. All three of us have vowed not to talk about UFOs or ufology - I have the over / under at 8 minutes for that!

Tune in at Kill Radio, or catch it later on the podcast.

Paul Kimball

The Ishmael Imperative

2011-06-04T02:17:00.008-03:00

When considering how an advanced non-human intelligence (ANHI) might view life on this planet, we humans almost always assume that it would be interested in interacting with us, because we are the dominant life form. This assumption, however, is more the product of our egotistical view of our own importance, and less about actual reality.

A few quick points to consider:

1. Relative to an ANHI, there might not be any real difference between we humans and other inhabitants of this planet - dolphins, for example, or elephants, or chimpanzees. In much the same way as we tend to lump most animals in together under the category of "animals", perhaps the ANHI would see Earth species in much the same way.

2. We have absolutely no idea how an ANHI would communicate, or what it might be interested in. It stands to reason, looking at things objectively, that it would be just as likely to be interested in a dolphin as it would be a human being. Indeed, perhaps certain animals are more receptive to ANHI communication than we humans are, being less cluttered in their thoughts. Or perhaps they are "smarter" than us, but in different ways?

3. Finally, perhaps a truly advanced NHI would be much more interested in communicating with / interacting with the oppressed and downtrodden, given that they may have evolved into a truly empathic consciousness. Within human society, that would include the poor, the homeless, the mentally ill / challenged, and those who for one reason or another have become social outcasts. It would also include all third world cultures in relation to the developed, Western world. But even those divisions might ring untrue to a truly empathic ANHI when compared with what is arguably the greater divide - how we humans, regardless of class, religion, or any of the other things that divide us from each other, as a species treat all the other inhabitants of this planet.

Is the life of a human being worth more than the life of any other inhabitant of this planet - like this chimpanzee that I saw at the Los Angeles Zoo the other day? We would say yes; an ANHI might not make that distinction. As I wrote on my Facebook status after coming back from the Zoo by way of a stop in Beverley Hills, I saw more "humanity" staring into the eyes of this sad little chimp than I did on all of Rodeo Drive.

I recommend that everyone read the wonderful and thought-provoking book Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn. The novel is a philosophical examination of the captivity of mankind under a distorted, imprisoning and damaging "civilization". In the end, Ishmael, a gorilla which can communicate telepathically, tells the narrator:

The story of Genesis must be undone. First, Cain must stop murdering Abel. This is essential if you're to survive. The Leavers* are the endangered species most critical to the world - not because they're humans but because they alone can show the destroyers of the world that there is more than one right way to live. And then, of course, you must spit out the fruit of the forbidden tree. You must absolutely and forever relinquish the idea that you know who should live and who should die on this planet.
* All "primitive" cultures

I think any truly advanced non-human intelligence would agree.

I believe that we will be judged by how we treat the other inhabitants with whom we share this planet. As things stand now, we would be found sorely wanting. Change is imperative - and not just "at the margins" change which would still have us at the top of the "planetary pyramid", but rather radical and revolutionary change that replaces that pyramid model of order with a different view - a circle, where everyone and everything is interconnected.

We must become neither "takers" nor "leavers" as envisioned in Ishmael - we must become sharers. Our future depends on it.

This might all sound very "new age" to many readers. To those who would see it that way, I ask one simple question - isn't it about time for a "new age" given how the "old age" has worked out for us, and our fellow inhabitants of this fragile world?

As I wrote in 1992:

In other words, who are we, and more important - who do we want to become?

Paul Kimball

A.D. - After Disclosure review: addendum

2011-06-03T17:50:00.006-03:00

Further to my review of A.D. After Disclosure, by Bryce Zabel and Richard Dolan, here are a couple of photos I took the other day whilst walking through Westwood, in Los Angeles, just a couple of blocks from UCLA.

Meanwhile, this lady was busily searching for some spare change to feed the meter where she had parked her Lexus, before she realized that she could use one of her credit cards - all while talking on her mobile phone.

A society that celebrates and rewards such conspicuous consumption, at the same time as it ignores abject poverty and human misery, is nowhere near ready for contact with an advanced non-human intelligence.

As Charles Bukowski wrote:

We are like roses that have never bothered to
bloom when we should have bloomed and
it is as if
the sun has become disgusted with
waiting.

If such an advanced non-human intelligence exists, I'm pretty sure it agrees.

Paul Kimball

Radio Misterioso this Sunday

2011-06-03T13:50:00.002-03:00

A programming note: I'll be live in the studio with good pal Greg Bishop this Sunday, the 5th of June, on Radio Misterioso, talking about the usual weirdness for 2 + hours - 8 pm until 10 pm PST / midnight to 2 am AST. Fellow traveler Walter Bosley will be along for the ride as well.

Among the topics of discussion will no doubt be my run of "coincidences" whilst in the United States the past three weeks. I'll save the latest for the show, but here is a clue:

You can listen at Kill Radio.

Paul Kimball

Charles Bukowski - The Aliens

2011-06-03T05:08:00.001-03:00

The poem "The Aliens" by Charles Bukowski, one of my favourite poets / writers, has absolutely nothing to do with UFOs, or the paranormal.

Or does it?

Paul Kimball

The Unified Field Theory of the Paranormal

2011-05-29T14:35:00.004-03:00

My best friend was a master at the "come hither" look. He could sit in a bar, stare at a girl in a certain way, and in most instances he would establish a contact that often led to... well, let's just say that it led to "something". I remember once betting him a pint beer that he couldn't get a particular girl to notice him. He went even further.

"Make it a pitcher of Stella Artois," he said, "and I'll have her and her friend at our table in ten minutes."

That seemed to be too good a deal to pass up, because while I didn't think he could do it, the girl's friend was cute and I had no problem playing wingman, so I took the bet. Seven minutes later, I was ordering him a pitcher of beer... and buying a couple of drinks for the girls, who had come over to our table without my friend saying a word to them, or motioning, or anything like that. He just looked at them in that certain way of his, and by doing so he changed the course of events. I could never do it myself - I would almost always look away at the pivotal moment, and even if I didn't look away, I could never quite read the "signs". Indeed, years later I wrote a song about the experience (and other related things).

This is, in its own way, akin to the observer effect - when you observe something, you invariably change it.

The theoretical physics of all of this is far beyond my proverbial "pay grade", so I'm not going to use the word "quantum" here - it's something that's tossed about far too frequently by people who don't understand what it truly represents in all its facets (including me). But we can see the basic principle that observation changes behaviour in the real world, without getting into theoretical physics. The example of my friend in the bar is amusing, but a far more concrete and pervasive example comes from my own work as a documentary filmmaker, and "reality" television, where the first rule of thumb is that as soon as you point a camera at someone, you will almost invariably change their behaviour. People react to being observed.

Many documentary filmmakers tend to look down on "reality" television as some kind of abomination on the grounds that it's not an accurate representation of reality, because such shows are often heavily scripted, and even if they're not, how can you expect someone like Gene Simmons tor Rick Harrison to behave the same way he normally would without a camera crew following him around. But here's the question that needs asking: what is reality, and what is normal? We change our behaviour all of the time, in both big ways and small ways, based on our interactions with others, or based on being observed. All that "reality" television does is create a different reality than the one which might have existed had the cameras not been there, but either reality would have largely been structured according to people dealing with other people in some way. It is an observed reality regardless, just as any "traditional" documentary is based on an observed reality, and the filmmaker's ultimate presentation and interpretation of that reality.

History shows us that you don't even need other people to have an observed reality where behaviour is constantly influenced and changed. All one has to do is read the diaries of Christians throughout the years to see that even the belief that they were being observed by God was enough to significantly influence their actions (indeed, an atheist might posit that the whole idea of God was introduced as a behavior control mechanism, but that's a debate for another day). In essence, a God that observes, and from time to time interacts in some way with humanity, as many people believe happens, is no different than a camera crew and writer working on a "reality" television series. What was Jesus and the crucifixion but the ultimate plot change in the "story"? Indeed, if it all happened now, it would probably look something like this:

In short, we live in an "observed reality", where our actions are constantly influenced by the awareness of being observed, whether this "awareness" is conscious, or unconscious (it's worth noting that the observers are increasingly artificial in nature, like the pervasive video cameras that we see on almost every street corner in most North American cities these days).

The tricky bit, as my friend knew was the case with women, is whether one can actually control the change induced by the observer effect, and therefore control people's behaviour, as opposed to generating a random effect that just changes their behaviour in unpredictable ways. My friend didn't just want anything to happen when he looked at the girl in the bar - he wanted a particular result. Accordingly, he looked at her in a particular way. If it had been someone like me, who was less adept at "the look", the likelihood of getting the desired result would have been much lower (trust me on this one).

All of which is to say that I think Jacques Vallee was essentially right. Vallee proposed that there is a genuine UFO phenomenon which has been active throughout human history, and which appears in various forms to different cultures. In his opinion, the intelligence behind the phenomenon has been engaged in social manipulation by using deception on the humans with whom they interact. In essence, we have been living in their reality show.

I would go further than Vallee, however, and suggest that all paranormal phenomena are interrelated, and a manifestation of the same non-human intelligence. Thus, ghosts and UFOs, for example, are simply different ways of trying to achieve the same effect. Sometimes this has taken a "world historical" form, as in the appearance of a "cross in the sky" to Constantine the Great at the Battle of Milvian Bridge, or Kenneth Arnold's UFO sighting in 1947, but most of the time it takes the form of little moments in the day-to-day lives of people, some of which might be noticed, but most of which are not, at least not on a conscious level (something like "deja vu" or a string of coincidences falls into the latter category). But somewhere, deep inside all of us (even the atheists), I think there is a feeling that we're being "watched", and an awareness that there is something out there which for whatever reason is influencing us to some degree, and for some unknown reason.

I think this is the "Unified Field Theory" of what we call the "paranormal". Shakespeare said it best: "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."

If all of this is true, however, then the question that remains: why would a non-human intelligence would engage in such activities. Are we simply actors, playing a particular role set out for us by the NHI... or are we also the writers and directors, and the NHI is the producer, providing us with the stage so that we can exercise our own creativity in our own way.

It's a question of being controlled versus free will, and it's the central existential question of human history. it's also the fundamental question that anyone interested in the "paranormal" needs to be asking.

Paul Kimball

Coincidental Theme Music

2011-05-28T14:53:00.001-03:00

Given the spooky run of coincidences I'm on right now, which is sort of like a no-hitter in progress, I thought I would post a spooky piece of "theme" music. Here is the tremendously talented Canadian composer Heather Schmidt performing "Solus" on the second season of The Classical Now, the television series I wrote, produced and directed back in 2004 and 2005 for Bravo.

You can find out more about Heather and her work at her website. Interestingly, she has a keen interest in remote viewing!

Paul Kimball

Coincidences, Cookies, Kids and the Duck That Won The Lottery

2011-05-28T03:22:00.005-03:00

Tonight, foot loose and fancy free in Hollywood, I wandered over to the Farmer's Market for dinner, after which I was planning on going to see Thor at The Grove theaters. Yes, I know - hardly living "la vida loca", but my reputation as a bad boy is a bit... overstated.

Anyway, after I finished dinner and walked up to the theater, I took a look at the massive crowds inside at the ticket lines, and decided to give it a pass. Instead, I headed into the Barnes & Noble next door to read a few graphic novels, and browse a few other sections.

I spent about twenty minutes reading through Superman: New Krypton, Vol. 3 (quite good!), and then walked down a couple of aisles to the New Age section, where I leafed through a few books, including Nick Redfern's new book The Real Men in Black, and Mark Pilkington's Mirage Men, because I wanted to have another look at the section he wrote about my friend, Walter Bosley.

After about another twenty minutes, I decided to head back to Greg's to catch the end of the Dodger's game. As I was headed to the escalator down to the main floor, I noticed the Philosophy section, and walked over to see if they had a copy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, because I lost my old copy about a year ago, and I've been meaning to pick up a new one ever since.

I found the book, flipped through it for a minute or two, and decided to buy it the next time I was in the store. As I was about to place it back on the shelf, a scream from the next aisle over startled me - three young teens in the Manga section were laughing and carrying on as they browsed some vampire books. I gave them a bit of a stern look, because I can't abide anyone who makes a ruckus in a public place, and then I turned back to the Philosophy shelves. Due to the distraction, however, my gaze focused not on the shelf where I found Meditations, but the one above it, where a particular book caught my attention - The Duck That Won The Lottery, by British philosopher Julian Baggini.

Now, as regular readers are aware, for years I have traveled with a stuffed duck named Zorgrot, who is sort of my company's mascot. This trip to Los Angeles is no different. Unfortunately, I've been so busy since I got here last week that I had forgotten to take Zorgy out of my knapsack until this afternoon. Just before I left for the Farmer's Market, I had taken a few photos of Zorgrot and "Kitty", the cat that I'm looking after while they're in Europe.

I thought it was a cute little coincidence that I had finally pulled Zorgy out earlier in the evening and now my attention had been drawn to a book with "duck" in the title, so I placed Meditations back on the shelf, and picked up The Duck That Won The Lottery. I opened it at random, to the first page of chapter 55 - "Chance wouldn't be a fine thing: The no coincidence presumption".

"Okay," I thought to myself, "what are the odds?"

Given the series of coincidences that I've experienced on this trip, I decided to try a little experiment. I closed the book, and put it back on the shelf. I wanted to see if this copy of the book was somehow predisposed to open at the beginning of chapter 55. I picked it up and opened it at random a dozen times, and not once did it come close to the beginning of chapter 55.

Three kids distracted me just long enough so that I would notice The Duck That Won The Lottery, which I opened at random to the chapter on coincidences, just that one time.

I put the book back on the shelf, and walked out of the store, thinking, "well, that was a weird."

On the way home, I decided to pop into Canter's Deli on Fairfax Avenue to pick up some cookies for a snack later in the evening. I ordered six chocolate chip cookies, and four little squares of some sort (they're tasty, but I'm not quite sure what they are). Now, at Canter's, the cookies aren't priced individually but by weight, so the clerk weighed them, and then rang them in. He turned to me and said: "that'll be three fifty five, sir."

Weird had just gotten weirder.

The antics of three kids had led me to notice a book with "duck" in the cover, which I then opened to chapter 55, about coincidences.

$3.55 for cookies, based on weight. If the clerk had picked a couple of different cookies for me, the price would have been different. It had to be those cookies.

I pulled out a five dollar bill, gave it to the clerk, and then asked him for a receipt, because I wanted a reminder of this coincidence, and because I wasn't sure anyone would believe me. Heck, I'm not sure I believe this run of coincidences.

3 kids.

Chapter 55, about coincidences.

$3.55.

Now it's getting really weird.

Paul Kimball

The LA Weirdness Continues...

2011-05-27T04:27:00.006-03:00

The run of coincidental weirdness continues on my West coast trip with what was the strangest experience yet (see here and here for previous instances)...

I got up this morning, and decided that I would catch the bus and head out past Westwood to visit the Getty Center, which is perhaps my favourite place in Los Angeles. The afternoon was a wonderful mix of art and reflection on the grounds, about as close as you can get to a Walden moment in Los Angeles, and then I caught the bus and headed back to Hollywood. By the time I got back to Greg's apartment, it was 6:00 pm, and I was really hungry, having eaten only a package of M & M's up until that point. I decided to head over to the Farmer's Market to grab dinner and catch some Thursday night live jazz. I grabbed a book to read - at first I picked a collection of John Shirley short stories, but at the last second I switched it, and took another book, which I had been meaning to read. More on that in a bit.

The place was jumping when I got there, and the tables in the area around the stage in the West Patio was packed. I wandered off to another section where my favourite deli is located, and ordered a cheeseburger. Now usually I just get it plain - burger and cheddar cheese, and nothing else - but this time, because there were other options on the cheese, and because I was getting a bit bored with the "same old, same old", I decided to switch it up. I went with Swiss cheese. That's important.

Anyway, the burger was going to take a couple of minutes, so I grabbed a beer from a nearby bar, wandered back to the deli to pick up my burger and fries, and then headed back to the section of the Market where the jazz group was playing to see if I could find a seat there. It was still packed, but there was a table at the back of the area, near an entrance, that wasn't taken, so I moved as quickly as I could through the crowd to get it before anyone else could, which I did. I sat down, pulled the book I had brought with me out of my knapsack, placed it on the table, and then began to eat dinner.

The jazz was good, the food was better, and the beer was the best part of all after a long day of walkabouts and bus rides. As I was eating my dinner, however, an elderly couple approached my table. There were three unused seats, and over the music the woman motioned to them as if to ask whether they were taken or not. I smiled, nodded, and said "they're all yours." She returned the smile, sat down with her husband, and listened to the jazz for a bit as I finished up my food. As the band finished up their set, the man stood up and headed off to get some them some food.

I'm a friendly sort, and I always like talking to people, so I looked over at the woman and asked whether she was from Los Angeles. As soon as she spoke, I knew that she was from further away than I was - her accent was definitely European, although I couldn't quite place it. Turns out she and her husband were from... you guessed it - Switzerland!

I chuckled to myself - these random people who had sat down next to me were from Switzerland, and for the first time in months I had ordered a hamburger with Swiss cheese on it instead of cheddar. Weird.

Then it got weirder.

I asked her what they were doing in the United States, and it turns out that they come here every second year to visit their daughter, and then vacation. "Oh," I said, "that's nice. Where does your daughter live?"

"Dallas," she replied.

I immediately looked at the book on the table in front of me, the one that I had grabbed at the very last minute instead of the one that I had first picked up back at the apartment. It was Final Events by my good friend Nick Redfern, who lives in... Dallas!

Like I said... weird.

Or, as The Fixx would say:

I'm beginning to wonder if I've drifted into an alternate reality, because I'm not making this stuff up!

Paul Kimball

The Prison of the Mind

2011-05-26T06:38:00.010-03:00

Here is a very interesting and thought-provoking lecture by Dr. Hal Puthoff, a pioneer into research about remote viewing:

The more I think about remote viewing, the more I think that it might hold the key to understanding the "paranormal", in all of its facets. Not quite a "unified field theory" of the paranormal, but a starting point to a comprehension of what our relationship might be with it, and with the world (or worlds) around us.

An interesting side note, continuing my run of coincidences on my current trip to Los Angeles (I'm cat-sitting for Greg Bishop and his wife while they're in Europe). I had set up a meeting with Walter Bosley this past Sunday for 7 pm at the sprawling Farmer's Market here in Hollywood, but he was coming into town in the afternoon and wanted to meet earlier if possible. I was fine with that, but my traveling companion Christina Cuffari had arranged to meet a friend in Culver City at 11 am, and then to return to Hollywood and meet up with Walter and I at 2:30 pm at the Market, so I wanted to make sure that I was there by no later than 2:45 pm, as she doesn't really know the area, and I didn't want to leave her hanging there.

Well, 2:00 pm came and went, with no sign of Walter. I didn't have his cell phone number, and at 2:20 pm I decided I had to head off to the Market to meet Christina, so I sent Walter a Faceook message telling him what was up, and letting him know that I would wait for him at the Market until at least 3:30 pm. I then hustled over to the Market (a 15 minute walk), and settled in to wait for either Walter or Christina.

After about ten minutes, Christina showed up, and we grabbed a coffee and sat down. Another twenty minutes or so passed, and I was getting hungry, so I popped over to the Market Grill, one of the small eateries in the Market and ordered a hamburger and fries, which the clerk told me would take about five minutes to get ready. I looked around, didn't see Walter, and went back to the table and asked Christina if I could borrow her I-phone to check Facebook and see if Walter had responded to my earlier message. Being the good friend that she is, she said yes.

Now, as people who know me are aware, I don't carry a cell phone of any sort. Never have, and I'm in no hurry to start. As a result, anytime that I use one, and try to type on the "keyboards / pads" that they have, I tend to muck it up at least once, and often more than once. In this instance, whilst trying to enter my Facebook user name and password, I made mistakes twice in a row. The third time was the charm, but the service on the phone was really slow, so I told Christina that I was going to pop over to the Market Grill to grab my food, which I figured was ready. Just as I stood up and looked in the direction of the eatery, who should walk into the busy courtyard from the entrance besides the Market Grill but Walter!

After I had introduced Walter to Christina, and picked up my dinner, we all sat down and had a chat about the sequence of events that had to have happened for Walter to be entering the courtyard just as I stood up.

Coincidence?

Surely... unless one keeps having them, at which point one starts to wonder, just a bit.

We have so little understanding of how the human mind really works, and the things of which it might really be capable if fully developed, or even if it were developed just a bit more beyond where it is now. Perhaps there is something to these "coincidences" that we just can't see, or understand. An entirely different world out there, beyond what we can imagine, much less access with our minds, at this stage in human development.

Possibilities.

Potential.

And yet we allow our education system to falter, and pay teachers a veritable pittance to even maintain the development that we have achieved, while we pay athletes and celebrities millions upon millions of dollars to "entertain" us.

We celebrate the perfection of the human body, whether in athletics or in the more nebulously subjective area of "beauty", but we are content to stand by (or in some case actually participate) as a Holocaust of the mind and spirit is taking place. We aren't moving forward; we aren't even standing still - we're moving backwards. If we really wanted to "reveal the goddess within", then it wouldn't be "J-Lo" getting paid a small fortune to sell us beauty products that we don't really need; it would be a teacher selling kids on why they should work hard and try to excel in school, and look to the future. Now that would be an ad worth running in between the pre-fab pop segments of something like American Idol. It might almost give such a show a useful purpose.

Franklin Roosevelt hit the proverbial nail on the head when he commented that "men are not prisoners of fate, but prisoners of their own minds". Never has that been more true than it is today, when it should be the exact opposite, given our technology. But maybe that's the nature of the human condition - like the smart but lazy kid we all probably knew in high school, as a species we're happy to just coast through this life, getting by and doing okay, but in the end falling far short of our true potential (with a few notable exceptions that prove the rule, as I've noted previously).

Could just anyone access higher brain functions / power (for lack of a better term), and remote view, or perhaps receive communication from an advanced non-human intelligence? I think so. Although I suspect that as with everything else we do, some people are going to have a greater aptitude for it than others, we all have the potential to be so much more than we are - and therein lies the key to understanding everything, including what we now call the "paranormal".

But there is real danger for us here if we continue to develop technologically even as we fall behind as a society in actual knowledge and ability to think and develop (think Eloi and Morlocks) - the risk of a new and even more intractable class system, where a select few can afford the tools that would allow them to access greater "power" of the mind, while the rest of us are given a life sentence in a prison of the mind that we are building for ourselves, day by day.

The good news is that I believe it's not too late, and that we still have the "key" - if only we're willing to use it, before we lose it.

Paul Kimball

The Other Side of Paul - Eternal Kiss

2011-05-25T21:32:00.002-03:00

I'm out in Los Angeles on a combination of business and pleasure - just signed co-production deals for two new feature films, which is always exciting - and as I was walking back from the LA Farmer's Market this afternoon, I thought I would make my first feature, Eternal Kiss, available for viewing for a while (I did this for a couple of weeks back in February).

So, here it is:

I learned a lot making this low budget feature, knowledge that I'm going to put to good use on the bigger budget projects to come.

Speaking of filmmaking, fellow traveler and good friend Walter Bosley has started an IndieGoGo campaign to help him finish his first feature, Greenspot Road.

As is the case with Greg, Nick, and yours truly, Walter's interest in the paranormal is only a very small part of the overall picture. Proper thing!

Paul Kimball

A.D. After Disclosure - a review

2011-05-25T00:24:00.005-03:00

During his lecture on "post-humanism" at the 2006 New Frontiers Symposium in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the late Mac Tonnies asked a critical question as he pondered whether we would make it to a post-human future (or any future, for that matter): "does humanity deserve to survive?"

The only thing more provocative than his question, which drew some raised eyebrows from the crowd, was his answer, which he gave after a short, thoughtful pause:

"I don't know."

When I look around the world today, much less at the whole of human history, I'm forced to agree with Mac in terms of his question, if not necessarily his answer (more on that below).

The truth is that we've done some amazing things in our relatively short time on this planet as a sentient species. We've built great cities, split the atom, crossed the oceans and then the skies, and eventually made our way to space.

But to what end, and at what cost?

I'm in Los Angeles right now, definitely one of those great cities that we've built, but the problem is that it's really only great for a privileged few. Poverty and homelessness is visible everywhere (except, perhaps, in the poshest neighbourhoods like Beverley Hills, where the police work very hard to make sure that the dark side of our society is kept at a safe distance, as if they were the zombies in George Romero's Land of the Dead). And then there's the question of how we "acquired" the land to build this great city, and all the others like it - by committing genocide against the indigenous population. I'm sure there's a lovely memorial about that somewhere around here...

Midnight Oil summed it up nicely back in the 1980s with a number of songs, none of which was more direct than "Beds are Burning", but almost no-one listened to what they were saying, even as they heard the song. I remember it well, watching people on dance floors grooving and grinding and trying to get laid as the song played, and thinking to myself: "this is wrong - you need to listen." They didn't listen then. They aren't listening now.

Speaking of Los Angeles, and lovely memorials, the neighbourhood that I stay in when I'm here is predominantly Jewish. The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust is a couple of blocks away, and there's a nice statue on the corner of Fairfax and Beverley in memory of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Jews during the Second World War.

However, the fact that we even have things like these reminds us of who we really are as a species, and it's not a pretty picture. For every Wallenberg, how many were there who actively participated in the Holocaust, from the top end, easy-to-identify villains like Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich, all the way through the middle management guys who made it happen like Eichmann, Wirth and Höss, to the bottom-rung minions who did the dirty work, like the recently convicted Ivan Demanjuk? Perhaps worse still, how many simply looked away - and not just in Europe?

If the Holocaust was just an isolated incident in human history, perhaps we could rationalize it in some way, but it's not. The Armenian genocide, Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s, the killing fields of Cambodia, the millions killed under Stalin and Mao... it's a long list, and that's just the 20th century. As Dr. Shimon Samuels, director for International Liaison of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, said: "Each case is specific as a threshold phenomenon, while each also adds its unique memory as signposts along an incremental continuum of horror."

A very long and ongoing continuum of horror, and violence, and oppression, often perpetrated by people who were once victims themselves. A cycle of violence, and inhumanity.

And then there are the smaller signs that we haven't progressed one iota as a species throughout our history. The Romans had gladiators? Well, so do we.

The difference? Roman gladiators sometimes died in combat, whereas our gladiators, who have a far larger audience within our culture, die years later, but far too soon, beset by myriad medical problems incurred in the name of entertainment.

Bread and circuses, then and now.

Now, it's true that on the other side of the ledger, we've had great composers, and authors, and philosophers, and spiritual leaders, and painters, and humanitarians, and peacemakers, all of whom have worked to enhance the human condition in their own way. But I would argue that these men and women are the exception rather than the rule, and they are not the exemplars celebrated by our society.

We remember MacArthur, Patton and Rommel, and have created a cult of personality around current military leaders like David Petraeus. Ask people who Dag Hammarskjöld was, and they'll probably guess that he invented a brand of ice cream. Mozart and Bach take a back seat to the pop tart du jour. Who wants to read Kierkegaard and Wiggenstein when we can watch Dr. Phil, or Dr. Drew? Romeo and Juliet becomes Gnomeo & Juliet... and so on, and on...

Ask yourself this question - would people be better off reading Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness, or playing MadWorld?

Mac was more understanding than I am.

Where he answered that he didn't know when it comes to whether or not we deserve to survive as a species, I would answer that I do know.

As a species, we don't deserve to survive. We haven't earned that right. Maybe we never will.

None of this should stop us from trying. But it should provide us with some perspective.

Which brings me to my review of A.D. After Disclosure, by Richard Dolan and Bryce Zabel. Even if one accepts their central premise (which I do not), that extraterrestrials are here, and that the government knows about it and has kept that knowledge secret, the book is dead wrong in its conclusions. Dolan and Zabel are hopelessly optimistic to the point of wide-eyed naiveté in their view of what the human response would be. In essence, they contend that things would go on pretty much as before, only better in the long run for us once we were made aware of "the truth".

The problem is that nothing in either our history or our current make-up indicates that this would be the case.

Nothing.

The book, which is well written and worth reading despite what I've just written, will find favour with the so-called "disclosure" crowd, and will probably make an entertaining movie someday. But it is fiction, because it has to be.

There will be no disclosure, not by the government, and not any aliens that have visited us (unless they are here to do us harm, in which case they wouldn't care, and would have done so by now). Both would understand one simple truth in the scenario set out by Dolan and Zabel - we're just not ready for "disclosure" as a species. As individuals perhaps, and I think that may have been happening for some time, to a select few. But a species that cannot justify its own continued existence has a very long way to go before it's ready for contact.

We can't look to a fantasy world where the space aliens arrive and save us, which is really what the "disclosure" movement is all about. We need to look to the real world, and save ourselves.

Only then will we have earned "it".

Paul Kimball

Beyond Best Evidence & The Ability To Think For Ourselves

2011-05-22T17:10:00.002-03:00

There is now less than a month left in the fundraising campaign for Beyond Best Evidence: The UFO Enigma, and the response has been very disappointing, I'm afraid. I remain hopeful that this home stretch will see a jump that moves us further towards our goal, if perhaps not all the way there, but despite myriad radio appearances to talk about the project (and over 8,000 visitors to this site since the campaign started), and nice write-ups from folks like Greg Taylor at The Daily Grail and Greg Bishop at UFO Mystic, the support hasn't happened (note: many thanks to the hardy "band of brothers" who have contributed so far).

Crowd fundraising developed as a way for filmmakers (and other artists) to maintain an independent voice in a world where media consolidation has diminished the ability to make those voices heard. As I've said before, a film like Beyond Best Evidence, with a thoughtful and intelligent discussion about the UFO phenomenon and all of its possible facets / explanations, simply isn't going to get made in the mainstream media system these days (note: if someone can do a similar film in the same way, I'll happily admit I was wrong). Networks don't try to enlighten these days - they are solely concerned with selling advertising, and sadly, in our consumerist society run amok, that imperative has trumped any other considerations when it comes to documentary filmmaking in particular, especially where it concerns a subject like the UFO phenomenon, which has been tabloidized and commercialized virtually to the point of no return. As a result, we get "reality TV" and what the networks call "factual programming", which is about as close to Orwellian "doublespeak" as you can get.

But maybe that's the world we live in these days. Maybe people are happy to sit back, not get involved, and just digest the grey glop that the multimedia conglomerates feed them. Maybe they don't want to be challenged. Maybe they don't want to think, or confront uncomfortable subjects. Maybe they've forgotten how.

In the New York Times yesterday there was a great opinion column by Charles Blow. In "A Summer to Simmer" Blow wrote:

At a hearing of the Senate Finance Committee about oil subsidies, John Watson, C.E.O. of Chevron — which reported last month that first-quarter net income rose 36 percent from the same period last year to $6.21 billion — said that “I don’t think American people want shared sacrifice. I think they want shared prosperity.” The problem is, Mr. Money Bags, that you and other corporate interests are the only ones sharing in the prosperity. For Americans on the lower end of the income spectrum, it’s all sacrifice.

The people who run these massive corporations - like the health insurance companies that want to raise health insurance premiums while reporting record profits for a third straight year, even as people forgo critical care - don't want an informed populace. They want slaves to the system.

But what does this have to do with the UFO phenomenon?

On the surface, nothing. But underneath, where free thought exists even in the worst of times, it has everything to do with the UFO phenomenon, because UFOs are something that can't be controlled by those giant monopolistic corporations, and the politicians who have sold their souls to those corporations. UFOS represent something subversive - possibilities that they would prefer we not think about, because if we do, then just maybe we'll start to take a different view of our world, and our lives. In short, we'll start to think for ourselves again.

Whatever UFOs might be (including the possibility that they can all be explained in prosaic terms), just considering them in a serious and thoughtful way is dangerous to the existing order... and we live in a world where we need a lot more dangerous thinking, because we've been placed in an existential trap, and it's time we tried to find a way out.

Is Beyond Best Evidence: The UFO Enigma going to get us out of that trap? Of course not. No film can do that, regardless of the subject matter. But it will be a small step in the right direction of reclaiming our ability to imagine a world other than the one that we've been told is the right one, and that's what I've always tried to do as a filmmaker. I don't try to encourage people to agree with me, or anyone else; rather, I encourage them to think for themselves about the world in which we live, even when their conclusions might be different than my own.

Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO Sightings from Paul Kimball on Vimeo.

I wrote at the beginning that I'm very disappointed by the response this campaign has received. The reason isn't because it will take profit away from my company (all profits from the sale of iflm will go to charity), or because I particularly want to spend months traveling and conducting interviews and then editing the film (not exactly the most profitable use of my time and talents), but because I think the film would be important, on a number of levels not just related to the specific question of "what are UFOs?"

Those are the kinds of films that I think should be made. The disappointment stems from the fact that not very many people seem to agree with me...yet. I'm asking for your help over the remaining 27 days to change that, so that we can move forward together, to raise a little hell.

Words of wisdom from some fellow Canadians!

Paul Kimball

The "Madness" of Peter Gersten

2011-05-20T17:16:00.007-03:00

In a recent blog post titled Flying Saucers and the Descent Into Madness, Anthony Bragalia identified four people loosely associated with "ufology" as being crazy, one of whom is Peter Gersten.

Gersten, perhaps best known as the "UFO Lawyer" for his work with Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS) to have various classified government documents released, has in recent years become focused on his belief that we are living in a computer simulation, which is set to either terminate or change in some way in 2012.

Bragalia pegged Gersten as someone who has descended into madness because of Gersten's publicly-stated plan to jump from Bell Rock in Sedona, Arizona, at 11:11 UT on Dec, 21, 2012 (4:11 am in Sedona), which Gersten believes is the time that a cosmic portal will open, and his "program" will change. According to Gersten:

I fully expect that it will either lead to the next level of this cosmic program; freedom from an imprisoning time-loop; a magical Martian-like bubble; or something equally as exotic. In March 2012 I will reach 70 years of age and nine months later we arrive at the cosmic coordinate. I think it will then be time for me to move on - in one form or another. I'd like to see what else our Cosmic Computer has to offer.

Unless you believe that this is going to happen, and I don't, then what Gersten is talking about doing is committing suicide.

I interviewed Gersten at his home in September, 2007, and his views had been clearly formed by that time, so this is not news to anyone who has been paying attention. Here are the excerpts I posted from that interview several years ago:

In his blog post, Bragalia lauds Gersten's work in getting government documents released, and his views that something exotic happened at Roswell in 1947, but looks at his newer ideas and their projected outcome as madness. He pleads with people who to "personally know Peter Gersten to counsel him against his decision. If they do not, it will be too late and we will look back wondering how it had ever happened."

Peter Gersten is free to do as he wants, and if he does indeed follow his convictions and jump off Bell Rock on December 21, 2012, I will applaud him for having the courage of his convictions.

What horrifies Bragalia seems perfectly logical to me, within the context of Gersten's stated beliefs. which I'm not going to judge. When I met him, Gersten struck me as reasoned, articulate and thoughtful. Yes, he believes in things that I don't accept as real, but so do over 2 billion Christians. Indeed, those Christians accept as the Son of God a man who had a profound conversation with a talking snake, and then essentially committed suicide through his actions in following what he believed to be prophecy to his crucifixion. In other words, he took a literal "leap of faith", and a significant portion of humanity has based their entire world view on that leap of faith for two thousand years.

Further, Gersten has made it very clear that this is a personal decision for him, and that he is not encouraging (or discouraging) anyone else from doing something similar. His responsibility is for his actions, and his alone, and he has every right to pursue his own path, even if people might not like where that path is going to lead him.

None of which is to say that Bragalia and others shouldn't try to dissuade Gersten from taking his "leap of faith" in 2012. That is their right. But they should do so with respect for Gersten's point of view, and without questioning his sanity. They should also do so with an understanding that Gersten's beliefs are more nuanced than the simple "he's going to jump off Bell Rock and kill himself because he believes a cosmic portal will save him, which is nuts" narrative that Bragalia presents.

Much of what Gersten has to say is really about free will. Further, even assuming that this is a simple question of suicide, it is important to remember that Western philosophy is more nuanced when it comes to the subject of suicide (or the right to determine where, when and how a person is going to die) than its opponents would have you believe.

In Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul, Scottish philosopher David Hume asked:

When suicide is out of fashion we conclude that none but madmen destroy themselves; and all the efforts of courage appear chimerical to dastardly minds ... Nevertheless, how many instances are there, well attested, of men, in every other respect perfectly discreet, who, without remorse, rage, or despair, have quitted life for no other reason than because it was a burden to them, and have died with more composure than they lived.

Arthur Schopenhauer went further in On Suicide

There is no tenable reason left, on the score of morality, for condemning suicide. The extraordinary energy and zeal with which the clergy of monotheistic religions attack suicide is not supported either by any passages in the Bible or by any considerations of weight; so that it looks as though they must have some secret reason for their contention. May it not be this - that the voluntary surrender of life is a bad compliment for him who said that all things were very good? If this is so, it offers another instance of the crass optimism of these religions - denouncing suicide to escape being denounced by it... When, in some dreadful and ghastly dream, we reach the moment of greatest horror, it awakes us; thereby banishing all the hideous shapes that were born of the night. And life is a dream; when the moment of greatest horror compels us to break it off, the same thing happens.

As Schopenhauer concludes, "They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice... that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person."

French playwright Antonin Artaud went even further still in On Suicide, and comes closest to Gersten's basic underlying principles:

If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will.

My own view? A person has complete control over their own being. We have free will, and I believe that Gersten's proposed "leap of faith" is an ultimate expression of his free will, in a world where our ability to exercise that free will is increasingly constrained by people who think they know what is best for others, or who would for their own purposes wish to deny our free will altogether.

Assuming Gersten really does jump from Bell Rock in December, 2012 (and he now seems less settled on that particular course of action than when I interviewed him in 2007), then I applaud his convictions, and his courage, regardless of where his "leap of faith" takes him. I certainly don't consider it "madness", any more than I consider it madness to follow a man who willingly created a situation that he knew would lead to his execution two thousand years ago. It's just another example of the anarchy that is free will, and it's what separates us from the animals.

As Greg Bishop, with whom I am staying here in Los Angeles, just said to me after reading this: "A person's free will should trump other people's beliefs as to how they should act, or what they should do."

Paul Kimball

Four hours at O'Hare

2011-05-18T18:13:00.003-03:00

Spend four hours at a busy airport like O'Hare in Chicago, as I did yesterday, and you'll understand why the human race isn't ready for "disclosure" of an "advanced alien presence", and won't be for many, many years (probably centuries), at least not on a societal level (the individual level is a different question, and is where we should be looking, but I digress...).

Leaving that aside, however, O'Hare did turn out to be an interesting experience for me in terms of weird coincidences.

First, a bit of back story. Several years ago, I was flying through O'Hare on my way to Cedar Rapids to interview Kevin Randle for Fields of Fear, and due to weather our flight was delayed for 9 hours. Now, anyone who has ever been to O'Hare knows that it's a huge airport, with multiple terminals, and within each terminal multiple concourses. It's an easy place to get lost, and there are all sorts of nooks and crannies. Anyway, as I was walking through the airport, who should I see but one of my best friends, who was studying in Mississippi but was on his way home to England for a visit. He was in a coffee shop. If I hadn't been held over, I would have missed him. If I hadn't taken a look over my shoulder at the coffee shop, I would have missed him. If... if... always "if"...

Let's just say that it was amazing coincidence, particularly in that airport on that day, with people packed in like sardines.

All of which is to let you know that I have a history of coincidences at O'Hare... which brings me to yesterday.

My flight to Los Angeles was through O'Hare, with a 4 hour stopover. Four hours is a lot of time to kill, so I wandered around through several different concourses. I didn't have any idea of which gate my flight to LA would be departing from, because it hadn't been posted yet. After about half an hour of walking around, I grabbed a hamburger from McDonald's and found a seat at gate B6, totally at random. I ate my burger, listened to my MP3 player for half of the Mumford & Sons album, watched a bit of CNN, and then walked over to the departures board to see if my flight had been assigned a gate yet. Indeed, it had - B6!

I smiled to myself as I pondered the odds of me choosing at random, in such a large airport, the exact gate that my flight was going to be assigned to, and then I went back over to the seating area at B6, sat down, and listened to some more music and watched some more CNN. After about an hour, with an hour and a half still to kill, I decided to go and get a copy of the New York Times to help me fill the rest of the time. I went down to the Hudson News by gate B16, bought the paper, and walked out into the hall. Just as I did, an announcement came over the PA - my flight had been relocated to a new gate.

B16, right next to where I was standing at that very moment.

There was only one thing I could do when faced with this second coincidence - I sat down, cued up Golden Earring on my MP3 player, hit play for "The Twilight Zone", and settled down to wait for my flight.

It was, as Arsenio Hall used to say, one of those things that makes a person go "hmm..."

Paul Kimball

Science - On the other hand

2011-05-18T12:08:00.002-03:00

The always funny Bill Maher offers a rebuttal of sorts to some of Paul Feyerabend's ideas.

Paul Kimball
posting from Greg Bishop's living room...

The Journey is the Destination

2011-05-17T09:23:00.002-03:00

Posting will probably be a bit less frequent over the next three weeks, as I'll be in Los Angeles on a mix of business and pleasure. A couple of programming notes:

I'll be on Radio Misterioso with my good pal Greg Bishop (and hopefully fellow traveler Walter Bosley as well) on Sunday, June 5th. As always, 8 pm - 10 pm PST / 11 pm - 1 am EST. House of Pies to follow!

Also, a reminder that the IndieGoGo fundraising campaign for Beyond Best Evidence is still going, like the Energizer Bunny. Films require funding, and we need your help on this one, because it's the kind of film that you're just not going to see from the dreaded mainstream media. Come join the team, and help start a new conversation!

In the meantime, stay true to your school, keep your eyes to the skies, and your feet in the clouds. Or something like that!

I'll leave you with a poem I wrote on a previous trip to California:

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Remember - if you're not enjoying life, then you're not really living it.

Allons-y!

Paul Kimball

Paul Feyerabend: Against Method

2011-05-16T22:29:00.002-03:00

The modern cult of science has enshrined the "scientific method" as their foundational principle, in much the same way that Christians look to Jesus on the cross, and all that it implies for them.

But method supremacy over subjective thinking which emphasizes context and meaning is a tragic mistake, and one which was the central target of the critique of modern science offered by philosopher Paul Feyerabend.

People interested in moving forward into the 21st century, and new knowledge and discoveries, should acquaint themselves with Feyerabend's work - in particular, his classic treatise Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge.

An excerpt:

For is it not possible that science as we know it today, or a "search for the truth" in the style of traditional philosophy, will create a monster? Is it not possible that an objective approach that frowns upon personal connections between the entities examined will harm people, turn them into miserable, unfriendly, self-righteous mechanisms without charm or humour? "Is it not possible," asks Kierkegaard, "that my activity as an objective [or critico-rational] observer of nature will weaken my strength as a human being?" I suspect the answer to many of these questions is affirmative and I believe that a reform of the sciences that makes them more anarchic and more subjective (in Kierkegaard's sense) is urgently needed.

Feyerabend called for a separation of state and science, in much the same way that we have long had a separation of state and religion in the West. In doing so, he is spot on. The institutionalization of science, and the resulting rigidity of thought, has done much to impede what should have been even greater progress for humanity by now, in the same way that the institutionalization of spirituality and faith throughout human history has led to rigidity in belief, and a lack of knowledge.

Feyerabend wasn't "anti-science" - far from it. He was an articulate, thoughtful and passionate voice calling out for a revitalization and reform of science, in a way that would be accessible to everyone, and that would recognize the strengths of science, and its limitations. It is a science that will no longer just speak to people; rather, it will be of the people, and in doing so encourage greater and more widespread knowledge.

The way towards this aim is clear. A science that insists on possessing the only correct method and the only acceptable results is ideology and must be separated from the state, and especially from the process of education. One may teach it, but only to those who have decided to make this particular superstition their own. On the other hand, a science that has dropped such totalitarian pretensions is no longer independent and self-contained, and it can be taught in many different combinations (myth and modern cosmology might be one such combination)... Scientists will of course participate in governmental decisions, for everyone participates in such decisions. But they will not be given overriding authority. It is the vote of everyone concerned that decides fundamental issues such as the teaching methods used, or the truth of basic beliefs such as the theory of evolution, or the quantum theory, and not the authority of big-shots hiding behind a non-existing methodology. There is no need to fear that such a way of arranging society will lead to undesirable results. Science itself uses the method of ballot, discussion, vote, though without a clear grasp of its mechanism, and in a heavily biased way. But the rationality of our beliefs will certainly be considerably increased.

You can find a short excerpt from Feyerabend's Against Method here.

We ignore his wisdom, particularly his central thesis that science is not one thing but rather many, at our peril.

Paul Kimball

Recreating the Past from the Future

2011-05-16T19:22:00.003-03:00

Alternate history is a popular genre of fiction consisting of stories that are set in a words where history has diverged from what actually happened. One of my favourite examples is the Robert Harris novel Fatherland, which the author creates an alternate history in which the Allied landings on D-Day failed, and by 1964 Hitler remained in power, locked in a stalemate with the USSR and a cold war with the United States.

But as much fun as it may be to read, or even to create, or it's all still fiction... right?

Well, maybe for us it is, but what about our descendants, far in the future (or perhaps not so far...), who may develop time travel?

The biggest problem with traveling backwards in time, as I pointed out yesterday, is what happens if you change something. Now, if you're going back solely as an observer, and could be certain that nothing would change (i.e. you couldn't actually interact with the people of the time period you were visiting or observing), then that's fine. But what if you wanted to interact, and change things? Well, you could, but then it would change your own reality, wouldn't it? Go back and kill your grandfather, and all of a sudden you don't exist.

Hence, the grandfather paradox. You can't travel back in time and change your own reality.

But what if you didn't want to change your reality; what if you wanted to create an entirely new reality?

That's a different story altogether. The branching universe hypothesis holds that there are infinite number of universes, all-together known as multiverse. If a person travels back in time and changes something, he would create a new reality, divorced from his own from that point in time onwards. Thus, in one world D-Day succeeds, and things play out as they have for us; in another, you could wind up with Harris' version of reality.

D-Day is set on a pretty big scope, however. That might be difficult to change (although perhaps not so difficult if the Germans could be convinced that the Allies were going to land in Normandy). Easier to influence would be single smaller events - what if, for example, you could prevent Lincoln's assassination? Or Kennedy's? Or what if Hitler had been killed during the Beer Hall Putsch? And so forth.

All of which leads one to consider the following question: are we living in one of those realities?

What if in the future, when time travel is achieved, our descendants, whether for amusement, or intellectual curiosity, or a combination of the two, decide to travel back in time and create new realities by changing key events, and then watching what happens?

Philosopher Nick Bostrom points out why an advanced civilization might engage in such an activity. Once we fix the world and remove all the things that we don't want, then we will have to find "something more inspiring", as Bostrom puts it, or something more challenging, as I might put it.

Now, Bostrom doesn't go as far into the future as I have in my speculation, to a world where time travel is possible. But the principle which he outlines is applicable.

Indeed, with the rise of interactive video games where the player can make more and more decisions, and therefore find more and more possible narrative outcomes, we're already seeing people in ever growing numbers in technologically advanced societies playing around with the idea of changing worlds.

Someday in the future, maybe that's exactly what people are doing. Perhaps they are changing our world all the time, and creating all sorts of new worlds. And while the pop histories tend to go for the big picture, so-called world historical figures, like Hitler, and Lincoln, and Caesar, maybe our future selves are more like those historians who concentrate on people's history, where you and I are just as interesting and important, in our own ways.

Would any of it matter to us?

Perhaps not, I suppose, because we wouldn't be aware of it. But it does make one think about the cherished notion of free will. Maybe things that happen to us, both big and small, really do happen for a reason, and we're all just NPCs in a real-life game of "change the world".

Whereas in Dungeons and Dragons, you can create and play a 8th level bard, or a 5th level mage, perhaps in the future, they can play "lawyer Paul", or "police officer Paul", or "historian Paul"... or any of the other paths I could have taken.

Maybe someone is "playing me" right now.

And maybe they're playing you too.

Paul Kimball

Films require funding...

Are We Ourselves?

2011-05-15T19:32:00.004-03:00

If the theoretical possibility exists that a simulated universe could be created, then how do we know that it hasn't already been created... by ourselves? In other words, are we the God that we have always imagined - the ultimate programmer?

Am I Paul Kimball... or am I someone future person's version of Paul Kimball, a history project by a super-advanced civilization, like a very, very advanced version of The Sims?

The thought occurred to me as I was walking through a cemetery this morning - wouldn't it be interesting to know how these people lived their lives? Who was this man, and who was that woman? All those tombstones - all those stories.

And then, as I stopped by one gravesite and stared at the tombstone of someone who had been dead for over a hundred years, I considered whether some person far in the future took a walkabout like mine, whether literal or figurative, stared at a tombstone or record or something else with my name on it, and decided they wanted to know who Paul Kimball really was, long after he, or I, died.

And so here "I" sit...

Paul Kimball

Speaking of Time Travel...

2011-05-15T13:12:00.002-03:00

Speaking of time travel, it may or may not be one of the themes in the film The Grey Wall, which has just gone through development with my company and looks good for production later this year (or early 2012, depending on scheduling). Not to give too much away, but here is an excerpt that touches on the idea of time travel... sort of:

SAM
How long have I been here?

Lawrence sits down opposite him.

LAWRENCE
Ahh... an interesting question.

Lawrence pulls a small piece of paper from his pocket, and places it flat on the table in front of Sam.

LAWRENCE (cont’d)
You see time like this piece of paper, flat, with edges, and defined parameters. Past, present, and the future. From one edge of the paper to the other, with a distance that is clear.

Lawrence points at an edge of the paper, and then starts to draw an imaginary line between the two with his finger.

LAWRENCE (cont’d)
Here is what has happened...

He points to the center of the paper.

LAWRENCE (cont’d)
Here is that which is happening now...

He points to the opposite edge.

LAWRENCE (cont’d)
And here is what will happen. But what if...

He folds the paper in two, so that the opposite edges touch against each other.

LAWRENCE (cont’d)
... you could bridge the gaps.

He pauses, and then slowly crumples the paper in his palm.

LAWRENCE (cont’d)
What if there were no gaps at all...

He opens his hand, and the paper is gone.

LAWRENCE (cont’d)
... just a road, circling back on itself, like a wheel in motion. An eternal now - where what once was may not be what is, or what will be.
(pause)
Does that answer your question?

SAM
I have no idea what you’re saying.

Lawrence pauses for a moment, and then smiles.

LAWRENCE
Proper thing.

Sam thinks for a moment.

SAM
Who are you?

Lawrence opens the palm of his other hand, to reveal the paper, which is folded once, and places it in front of Sam.

LAWRENCE
A friend.

Sam picks up the paper, and starts to unfold it. Written on the paper is a number...

“6164”

SAM
What is this?

LAWRENCE
Some would call it a deus ex machina.
(pauses, smiles)
I’d call it an address.

We're casting now... but one role is already covered - that of co-lead "Sarah", which will be played by one of Canada's great young up-and-coming actresses, Christina Cuffari, who has also been with Doing Time since its first theatrical run here in Halifax back in 2007.

The Grey Wall will be out just in time for the 2012 apocalypse!

Paul Kimball