Lourdes

(Sorry I haven't written a main site article for a while. I've just been too busy with other things.)
I went to see Ian R Crane live in Birmingham a couple of months ago, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/shift-2-with-ian-r-crane.htmlAs I explain in the article, the venue was opposite St Chads Cathedral and the sight of that place brought back some deeply unpleasant memories to me. It was all connected to a holiday I took in 1997. I went on a pilgrimage to the holy shrine at Lourdes. This was an experienced that marked a major turning point in my life. I've mentioned several times that I'm from a Roman Catholic family. My mother was a Dutchwoman from the county of Limburgin the south east of the Netherlands, which is the only Catholic province in a predominantly Protestant nation. (Also it's quite hilly, which makes it unique in the Netherlandsin another way). When she married my dad he converted from his Bristol-Welsh Anglican roots. My mother's very orthodox upbringing combined with my dad's conversion must have caused some discussion among the newlyweds which led to them raising me and my brother in a fairly irreligious and liberal environment. My mother refused to have me baptized, much to her parents' consternation, but she wanted me to make up my own mind when I was old enough. For this I'm very grateful to her; I had my own daughter baptized and wish now that I hadn't. I chose of my own accord to be baptized Catholic when I was aged 17 and received my first Holy Communion at my family's local church in Oxford. However my Catholic beliefs were to be extinguished forever within a decade, and that pilgrimage to Lourdes in 1997 was a very big bucket of water thrown on the fire.
Lourdes is a small and a wannabe insignificant town in the foothills of the Pyreneesmountains in southern France. It has a native population of just 15,000 but has to cater for over 5 million visitors per year, making it one of the world's most visited locations. In Franceonly Paris has more tourists, and in the world only Mecca has more pilgrims. The reason for all this attention is that in February 1858 Bernadette Soubirous, the 14-year old daughter of a poor miller, claimed to have seen a "beautiful lady" whilst collecting firewood in a rocky grotto beside a nearby river. This "lady" was small, about three feet high, and was standing in a niche high up in the rock wall of the grotto. At first her parents didn't believe her, but when Bernadette went back to the grotto a few days later she saw the lady again. This time she had brought some holy water with her to throw at the apparition in case it was from the Devil, not God. It's important to realize while studying this case that the community she was growing up in was intensely religious. Everybody was a devout Catholic and any other worldview would have been unthinkable and incomprehensible. The next day Bernadette went to the grotto a third time and on this occasion the being spoke to her, in perfect Gascona, Bernadette's native language, that has been supplanted in Lourdes by French and today is extinct. The apparition asked her to return to the same spot every day for a fortnight. Bernadette did as she was asked and every afternoon knelt down to pray in front of the grotto carrying a candle and her rosary. Each day more and more people gathered to watch her. At first just the girl's family followed her, but within five days crowds of several hundred clustered on the riverbank and stood silently while the young girl prayed. Although only Bernadette could see the being, other people started to believe her and some already began wondering if Bernadette was seeing the Virgin Mary. The ninth appearance of the "lady" is the most interesting. The apparition instructed Bernadette to have a drink. The girl thought it meant the river and went over to the bank, but then the being pointed at the ground inside the grotto. Bernadette turned over a few stones and saw a puddle of damp mud. She began digging with her bare hands and soon water began to flow out of the ground. Bernadette had discovered the famous Lourdes Spring. A few weeks later some builders moved in and created a small brick tank to collect the water; today a huge network of pipes and taps are plumbed in leading to fountains, basins and the bathing pools. Three days after Bernadette dug up the spring a local woman washed herself in it and had her paralyzed arm instantly healed. The doctor who examined her could find no medical explanation for this; it was the first of the hundred or so "Lourdes Miracles" that have taken place over the years. On one occasion while Bernadette was kneeling and praying in the trance-like state that she always experienced in the presence of the "lady", the candle she was holding melted and the flame licked her hand, but on later examination her hand was found to be stained with soot, but completely unharmed.
By now the Church authorities had got involved. Bernadette's local priest, Father Peyramale, called the girl a liar and approached the local bishop for help. This was aggravated by the being's request, relayed by Bernadette, that they should come to the grotto in full procession and build a chapel there. The bishop ordered Peyramale to stay out of it. However the next day the bishop asked Bernadette to tell them who the lady was. Bernadette asked, but the lady didn't reply and "just bowed her head and smiled". It was only three days after that, after Bernadette repeatedly badgered the being with the same question, that it finally looked at her with a serious expression and said: "Que soy era l'Emaculada Concepciou", this is Gascona for "I am the Immaculate Conception". It seems there was a lot of political pressure both for and against Bernadette's actions within the church and local government that is hard to follow. At one point it is said that Bernadette's father was offered a "Golden Louis", the biggest denomination of currency at that time, which could have lifted the family out of poverty by "somebody" in exchange for Bernadette making a false confession, telling everybody that she'd lied. The full story can be studied in one of the many badly-translated guidebooks that the visitor can purchase from the numerous souvenir shops in Lourdes, but the most detailed account comes from Franz Werfel's so called "novel", The Song of Bernadette. This was published in 1942 and made into an Academy Award-winning film two years later. Werfel was not Catholic himself, nor was he French. He was a Sudetenlander German and a Jewish refugee from the Nazis. He settled in Lourdeswhile he was on the run from the French "Collaborators" and met many elderly people who had known Bernadette as children and remembered her. He claims to have based the book on their testimony. The basic factual account of what happened was recorded by the Church and by local authorities, but much of the unwritten and underlying goings on, after over one and a half centuries, I think are open to interpretation and debate.

Nevertheless, since the days of Bernadette Soubirous' experience, Lourdes has become the second biggest pilgrimage destination in the world and in 1997 I was one of those pilgrims. My brief few years as a Christian-believer began at a time of my life I have trouble remembering. I do have "missing time" in my life, but not just a few hours; on and off, a number of years! The period between the ages of about 15 and 23 are full of these lacunae, in fact I occasionally meet up with people whom I met during those years who greet me and I don't recognize them. But for motives I can't recall today, at the age of 17 I decided to be baptized; I must have experienced a feeling of what Christians call "faith" a belief that the God of the Bible: Jehovah, Yahweh, what the Muslims call "Allah" and the Freemasons "Adonai", was real. The Birmingham Diocese, which includes Oxfordshire where I live, has organized a pilgrimage to Lourdesevery year since the 1950's and over a thousand people travel there annually with the group. It's still going on today and the 2012 pilgrimage took place this June, see: http://www.birminghamlourdespilgrimage.com/Here's an article in Catholic Todayabout the event, including photoes: http://www.catholic-today.co.uk/component/k2/item/152-lourdes-2012. I recognize a few faces from these images, individuals who are clearly still involved today fifteen years later; I won't say which ones for reasons that will become clear. I joined the pilgrimage at South Mimmsservice station on the M25 just north of Londonand was immediately approached by a bouncy, grinning young man who introduced himself as Father Alfie, the chaplain of the Diocese's youth section. He was unlike any priest I'd ever seen, dressed in Bermuda shorts and a Hawaiian shirt; only his loosely-fastened dog-collar identified him as a man-of-the-cloth. Alfie is not his real name; I will be giving false names to everybody I refer to on this pilgrimage, with the exception of Mike Stanley and Jo Boyce. We boarded the motorcade of coaches and headed off to Dover. One of the coaches was called a "jumbulance", a vehicle specially adapted for the disabled pilgrims. I'm very opposed to political correctness, but I do find using the word "sick" to describe them as somewhat demeaning. We crossed the English Channel on a ferry and then boarded a chartered train at Calaiswhich took us overnight to Lourdes. The train was similarly adapted as the coach and the French railway service must be used to the massive visitor-load that Lourdesexperiences. I was a bit emotionally overwhelmed to arrive at Lourdes, one of the many times I was emotionally overwhelmed during the time I spent there. The area around the grotto where Bernadette had her visitations has been converted into a holy sanctuary on a scale that matches the Vatican. The land around the grotto was bought by the Church in 1864 and pieces of the surrounding area were added over the years until it reached its present size of 126 acres. The Domain, as it is called, has a huge esplanade running in a straight line to the hill above the grotto. On the top of that is the Rosary Basilica, see the photo above, which is a beautiful sight. Leading off from these are numerous other Basilicas and chapels, all spotlessly clean and decorated with a grandeur I've never seen before or since. There's a Stations of the Cross route which has larger than life statues and a huge underground chamber called the Basilica of St Pius XI which has the most magnificent acoustics. When the organ is played there it made me quiver at the knees! Every evening there's a very moving torchlight procession that goes up and down the esplanade accompanied by music, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4reKbaO_50When I look back now, I can see that the Church uses extreme sights and sounds, like those in the Domain to "shock-and-awe" its adherents in order to control them. The overwhelming feelings I had are probably shared by almost everybody who arrives there. Life on the pilgrimage was easy and slow and the eight days we were there felt like eight weeks. As a member of the youth section my duties were to be a "brandcardier", which is not that different from my ordinary working duties of being a Hospital Porter; so much so that it was almost like being on a "busman's holiday". My job was to transport the "sick" pilgrims from their hostel, which was a big, modern hospital-like building called L'Accueil de Notre Dame, to the places of worship in the Domain for mass each day. These masses were extraordinarily elaborate and took several hours. Up till them I'd only been used to the services at my local church and this was a new experience for me. In the afternoon and evening there'd be another outing, to the Stations of the Cross or a musical concert or other events. Then the brancardiers would all head for the local bistroes to have a few beers, usually accompanied by dancing and singing. I said above how the Catholic Church has become adept at using grand architecture, glorious music and elaborate spectacles to turn the heads of its congregation, but in recent years it's become quite good at the happy-clappy, guitar and tambourines, touchy-feely stuff too. In fact it's almost New Age in some of the things it does at Lourdes. Instrumental to this aspect were the musical duo Mike Stanley and Jo Boyce who attended the event every year. Despite completely lapsing since first meeting them I still think they're excellent and still enjoy their songs, which without the Christian-themed lyrics at times approach a Celtic and pagan naturalist sensibility, like Song for the Trinity and Bread of Life, see: http://www.cjmmusic.com/ (I see that Mike has come down with cancer. I'm sorry to hear that and I wish him a speedy recovery) Here they are on the BBC's Songs of Praise: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLjM8IlrVrk.

It all sounds wonderful, doesn't it? And in some ways it was. It was deeply intense, joyous, carefree and very nicely ungrounded without being wantonly so; but it had a false and dark side to it. The pilgrims were governed by a pseudo-military structure. We all had uniforms, which as you can see from the photoes were a blue, branded T-shirt and a yellow neckerchief, and badges to identify our roles. We were run by a Chief Brancardier who in turn had a team of deputies who dispensed orders to foot-soldiers like me. The deputy who was head of my section was an obnoxious and two-faced little man called Martin. He took an instant and groundless dislike to me, as some people do, and took every opportunity he could to wield his authority against me. "Come on, Ben, chop-chop!" he once sneered at me very loudly in front of everybody when he decided I was pushing my antiquated voiture, a "sick" pilgrims' transporter handcart, a tad too slow. This made me feel very embarrassed, not least because one of the people watching was a small, dark-haired and dark-eyed young woman called Claire whom I'd become rather sweet on; in fact in the heady atmosphere of the location, I'd experienced with her what the French call a "coup de foudre". Martin picked up my attraction for Claire straight away and used to be especially unpleasant to me when she was around for that reason. I wasn't the only person he grated on; many others on the tour found him pompous and abrasive. And, as I said in the Ian R Crane article linked above, he misled me over the day of the St Chads mass. The fact that somebody like Martin could rise to a position of authority shows that there's a serious snake in the Lourdesgarden. Of course people like that always float to the top in conventional organizations, which begs the question: how unconventionalis Lourdes? However there's a silver lining to this cloud in that Martin was the biggest inspiration behind the character Trevor in my novel Rockall, which I began writing soon after coming home from the pilgrimage, see: http://hpanwo-bb.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/rockall-chapter-1.html. My brother, who accompanied me on the pilgrimage, kept very quiet during the trip but afterwards I found out that he shared my cynicism, and, if anything, felt it even more strongly. As you can see from the link above about this year's pilgrimage, the Queen's Diamond Jubilee was celebrated in the same way it was back in Britain, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/lizard-in-city.html. While I was there we also had to watch a military parade because the "Perigrimage Militaire" was in progress. During that week Christianity is not the only religion worshipped there; as Dr Lawrence Britt said in 14 Signs of Fascism: "Soldiers and military service are glamourized and glorified". There are aspects of my pilgrimage to Lourdesthat I've not mentioned here because I still find it too painful to write about, even after fifteen years. However I don't want people to get the idea it was all nasty; it wasn't. I very much enjoyed the friendships I made with the "sick" pilgrims I cared for and one day I took a few of them out to a bistro with one of the other deputy-chief brancardiers; not Martin, a nicer one whom I liked. We had one of the most enjoyable times out I've ever known and I'll never forget it. The "sick" men were all Irish and I still laugh when I remember them trying to explain to the French waiter that they wanted a "real Guinness". I also met an amazing man called Brother Brendan who was a Sacred Heart friar. But he was not your popular image of a monk at all! He used to like a drink, he smoked and he swore. I kept in touch with him for a while afterwards; he was great fun. So there were good times there as well as bad, but would I go back there again? No.

Bernadette Soubirous entered a convent when she was 22 years old. There, as Sister Bernadette of the Charity of Nevers, she worked as a nurse and used to produce works of embroidery. Never in the best of health, she died of tuberculosis at the tender age of 35. She was canonized by Pope Pius XI in 1933 and her feast day is April the 16th. When I look back at her experiences, now more scientifically-minded than I was back then, I wonder what the truth was behind what happened. I do not accept the Skeptics' dismissal of the Marian apparition at Lourdes as hallucination, hysteria, corruption and the various other straw-clutching cop-outs that the likes of Richard Dawkins wheel out; see here at 2.31: http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=9002284641446868316But at the same time, I wonder what would have happened if the entity Bernadette encountered had appeared in a place where there lived people of a different culture and mindset. You see, apart from Bernadette's statement that the being had said: "I am the Immaculate Conception" there is nothing else at all to identify it. In a society like the one Bernadette lived in I wonder if the appearance of a benign feminine entity, or "gynaeform phenomenon", would have been accepted as anything other than what it was. When Bernadette first saw it she wasn't sure; this is why she took the holy water the sprinkle on the apparition. She thought it might be the work of the Devil or a soul escaped from Purgatory. I no longer believe in the Immaculate Conception but I do accept that people experience very real encounters with non-physical beings. These come in all shapes and sizes, like aliens, ghosts, Djinn etc. They can be friendly, hostile or indifferent in personality. Sometimes, in areas where the people are secular or a different religion is predominant, entities are seen that also appear as a human female, just like at Lourdes. These entities are often very friendly, even loving. They may provide healing and spiritual inspiration. If one of these appeared in such a society, like modern Britain, and they do occasionally, they'd be described as an "angel" "she-elf" or "goddess". I don't wish to offend any Catholic devotees of Lourdes who are reading this article, but I feel I have to interpret Bernadette's experience, and its legacy, in terms of the culture it emerged in. I repeat: I do not for a moment suggest that Our Lady of Lourdes does not exist, only that she may not be what most people think she is. Bernadette describes the "beautiful lady" as being clad from head to foot in a white dress with a white headscarf; only a light sash around her waist was blue. All the other Marian images I've seen depict the mother of Jesus in bi-colour, usually with a white dress and blue headscarf or vice versa; occasionally you'll see another bi-colour clothing depicted, like brown or green. This is the image of her Bernadette would have been familiar with. The most unusual feature of the being was that she had two yellow flowers clasped between her toes; this is nothing like the popular image at all.

On the other hand I could be completely wrong, and it could be that the Blessed Virgin Mary doesexist, but I doubt that very much, and there are many reasons for my doubt which are too big a subject for this article. One thing that I'm sure of is that Bernadette's encounter with this beautiful, loving being was completely real and it had an enormous impact on her life and many other people's lives, it was an influence for the better in most cases. I would never take that away from them. But I still think she should belong to nobody. The Vaticanhas claimed this entity as its own, given her a label and decided how the people who visit the place where she appeared should interpret her. I resent that deeply.

And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/neil-armstrong-dies.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/kevin-annett-and-archbishop.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/gary-paterson.html

And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/london-olympics-opening-ceremony.html
And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/battle-of-beanfield.html
And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/the-gyptians.html

And: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/programme-9-podcast-ian-r-crane.html
And: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/programme-8-podcast-exopolitics-special.html
And: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/programme-7-podcast-return-of-kevin.html

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How I became an ex-Hospital Porter

Important background article: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2012/01/my-interview-on-critical-mass-show.html Since this radio show was recorded I’ve received confirmation that the case against me was centred around my appearance in the national newsprint media, as I always suspected; this was clearly published in the Management’s case dossier. The only thing revealed to me about the “complaint” against me was an email that was like no other I’ve ever seen from a member of the public. I was told that it was anonymous and it simply read: I have reason to believe that Ben Emlyn-Jones, one of your hospital porters is behaving in an unprofessional manner on the internet. I would not like to visit your hospital with this person as a porter in my care, or one of my family. I thought I would bring this to your attention. Thank you. And it contains a brief list of some of my videos that this “person” feels “concerned” by. However in pride of place at the top of the list is a link to the online edition of my interview in the Wales on Sunday. I’ve seen letters of complaint from members of the public before. They're usually long and rambling and tend to be self-referring, like: "I'm not somebody who often makes complaints, but..." or “This badly affected my experience of being X-rayed...” etc. This email is totally different in style: it’s short, factual and uses terminology more commonly used by political and senior administrative officers than outsiders. This very thin paper trail was to be the backbone of my defence case, and unfortunately it was too thin. Yesterday I was discharged from the Hospital Portering Service. I am now a civilian. I was so mentally exhausted last night when I came home that I only had it in me to write a brief notice on the Voice, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2012/01/porter-no-more.html

I met with my shop steward on Thursday evening to make a plan of action and we totally disagreed on what should be done. Lately he has been coming round to seeing things my way. To begin with he was very sceptical of my suspicions and denied that the newspapers had anything to do with what’s happened to me, but since the dossier came out and my prediction was confirmed he's changed his mind. However he still wanted me not to use that to defend myself and instead try to counter the specifics of the allegations; I, on the other hand, thought it best to refuse to discuss the specific allegations and instead focus on why I thought they were a complete charade to disguise the real reason I was in trouble. I don’t blame my shop steward at all; he advised me and I went against him. However if I’d gone along with his course of action I doubt if the results would have been any different. As I said in the radio interview linked above, I know how NHS management works and I recognize the symptoms of bloodlust when I see them. They wanted me out, and they were determined to get me out! They have a number of methods for doing this and many of them were deployed against me at yesterday’s hearing.

The hearing was due to start at 1.30pm and I felt strangely calm and relaxed as I walked the few miles from my home to the hospital yesterday lunchtime. This was odd because the afternoon before I had been very anxious, dreading what was to come the next day like a dentists appointment. I strolled at a leisurely pace and walked through the parkland and wooded areas on my journey, avoiding the quicker and more direct route along the main roads. For some reason that I couldn’t fathom at the time, I kept humming to myself the song Feed the Birds from the musical Mary Poppins, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABc1-6o9cF0 The hearing was held in one of the conference rooms and was presided over by a squad of six officers from the Trust’s central administration Management. It’s important to realize that this “complaint” had originated from outside the hospital; there's a rumour going round that an MP is involved. Therefore neither the Head Porter nor any of her deputies from my own department, my immediate bosses, were allowed anything to do with it. I was charged under the category of “conduct outside work”, in other words they had no problem at all with the quality of my job or anything else that went on while I was on duty; it was instead alleged that what I was saying and doing in my personal life off-duty had a direct and major impact on the Trust’s reputation and ability to perform its designated purpose. This is a highly unusual situation; most disciplinary cases are very straightforward, for instance: a member of staff turns up for work drunk or steals money from a cashbox etc. When I was first suspended I was given a copy of the NHS’ Disciplinary Action Procedure handbook and under the category of “conduct outside work” it only covers suspected criminal activity. For example, if a member of staff were accused of abusing a child that operative would be suspended to protect the children who were patients, which is fair enough. My case was totally different; it was “conduct outside work” but involved no criminal allegation, and so has no precedent in the published policy.

As I took my place at the table I had a definite strategy at hand. Firstly and throughout the meeting, I kept my gaze fixed on the tabletop in front of me and avoided all eye-contact with the presiding officers. I also kept my hands clasped in front of me and sat straight up in my chair. Many officials in Government operations of all kinds are trained in interrogation techniques, such as reading body-language and subliminally influencing the minds of other people. Organizations like Common Purpose are said run courses in it, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2009/06/alternative-view-ii-part-5.html and even TV celebrities like Derren Brown demonstrate it, see: http://www.channel4.com/programmes/derren-brown-mind-control/4od I was concerned that the people in that meeting room with me might be some of them. From the very start I knew that Management had anticipated my defence from reading my submitted statement, and perhaps also by listening to my radio show or watching HPANWO TV, because the chairman said in his introduction: “It may be necessary for me to remind us all to stay focused on the allegations themselves and not deviate onto supposedly related matters”. The Management’s advocate opened their case by repeating what was written in the dossier. The Wales on Sunday article was mentioned only when the “complaint” letter was dictated and not referred to again. The Management advocate’s whole testimony was based on the notion that some of my HPANWO material was "offensive", most notably my films Microchip a Muslim Day, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2010/09/microchip-muslim-day.html , David Icke’s New Book, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2010/05/david-ickes-new-book.html and I'm Thinking about Sex, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/04/im-thinking-about-sex.html There’s no doubt that Management have gone to a lot of expense and effort to build this case against me. They must have set up an entire office for weeks on end to create this file; regular HPANWO-readers will know how many articles and films I’ve made! Despite the 20 billion pounds cut from this year’s NHS budget and staffing levels at an all-time low, the Trust's Management felt that getting rid of me was money and time well spent. How flattering! I remember that this was what happened to Kevin Annett, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/03/kevin-annett-liverpool-lecture-12311.html . This also brings me back to the question of why I was suspended straight away, without any discussion first. For an employer, suspending somebody is very awkward; it generates a lot of paperwork, takes time and costs a lot of money. It’s something you normally would only do when you have to, if for instance one of your staff has committed an act of gross misconduct, like getting drunk on duty, as I said above. I hadn’t done that, so why didn’t they just ask me nicely first to remove the objectionable material? This is not how they normally operate, and this adds to my suspicion. However, my suspension does make sense if you suppose that their motivation was to break me down psychologically. When I was suspended I was told next to nothing about what I’d done wrong and was left for an entire week at home before they contacted me, to lie awake at night and bite my nails. This is a standard technique used by torturers and interrogators. They always lock their victim up alone in a cell for a while first, to let them “stew in their own juice”. So before the interrogation even begins, the victim is thinking: “What have I done!? What are they going to ask me!? What are they going to do to me!?” and so when they finally come for you you’re “softened up”. I suspect Management hoped that when I walked into the investigation meeting a week later I’d be a nicely-compliant nervous wreck. Well I wasn't! It didn’t work! I was offered a deal: To remove the “offensive” material and they'd reconsider my suspension, which I refused. Firstly I had already guessed that this incident was generated by my appearance in the media and so experience says I was doomed anyway; secondly, they were a bit vague about exactly what they wanted removed. It started with just the Butt vid, but then they said they were concerned that I had my uniform on in a few vids. They could have eventually decided everything I’ve ever done was for the chop; and thirdly I know people, like Kevin Annett whom I mentioned above, who have made a stand against the Man when they’ve had far more to lose financially than I do. I’m in a lower-paid job with no mortgage or anything; I’ve even got a very sympathetic landlord who’s going to let me carry on living where I am for “a few months” without paying rent, so what excuse do I have? How could I look Kevin Annett or Tony Farrell in the face and tell them I was too scared to stand up to all this when they weren’t!?

According to Management my film Microchip a Muslim Day is racist which is complete nonsense! It is, I think, a very obvious anti-racist satire; this is what I intended it to be and this is how I think it comes across. My character is smoking a fake cigarette and wearing pink sunglasses! In that entire series Butt is presented a figure of contempt. The theme of the film is to warn people not to be goaded into feeling hostility for Muslims, or other creeds and colours, which is what our media and political leaders seem to want us to do as a standard divide-and-rule tactic. However when I tried to make this point the Management appeared to feign an attitude of forced obtuseness. The chairman said: “What? It’s a comedy, yet it makes a serious political statement? That’s a contradiction.” I then had to explain, not that the film was a satire, but what satire was! I asked the chairman if he’d ever seen the politically satirical film Dr Strangelove and he replied: “that’s not relevant”. This is a phrase that they would repeat again and again; a tactic to confuse my points and twist facts. In fact using these tactics it’s possible to persuade somebody that almost anything anywhere is offensive! Skeptics are trained in the same methods, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2011/11/london-skeptics-in-pub-141111.html . The other films were supposedly considered unsuitable presumably because I’m unclothed in them, but this is equally ridiculous. I’m not any more unclothed than anybody you’d see in any public swimming pool or on the beach. If I had posted HPANWO TV films of myself naked then YouTube would quickly have removed them and given me a stern warning. There are some online video sites that don’t mind members posting videos of themselves naked, indeed some keenly encourage you to do so! But YouTube is definitely not one of them. At any rate, I refused to say this in the meeting. Apart from my discussion over the Butt film, my policy was not to address the allegations; this was the basis of my defence which I had my chance to present next.

There was one point that my shop steward managed to get struck from the record and that was the most hurtful and insulting allegation of all: That I had bullied another member of staff. What had really happened was that I and another member of staff decided to make a comedy video together for our own mutual amusement and post it on HPANWO TV. This person was a very close friend of mine at work (Still is I hope!) and I’d never dream of doing anything to harm him. This person is a grown man in the same age group as myself; however because he suffers from a comparatively minor learning difficulty and is registered as a vulnerable adult my accusers have reduced this completely harmless, enjoyable and innocent project to some kind of “happy-slapping” attack on my part. Anyway, a member of this person’s family contacted me privately and asked me to remove the video in the first week of my suspension, one of the many peculiar coincidences that have struck in the last couple of months.

My shop steward remained in the room although he didn’t speak at all for this session other than to confirm that I was presenting a case that he did not approve of. I said that I was not going to address the allegations directly because there was a fundamental difference between the Management’s view of matter and my own. I didn’t think it would do any good for my case to “play along” with Management, but instead take a step back and base my defence on the bigger picture. As I said above, my shop steward advised me to cooperate with Management by directly addressing the allegations made. If I did this, he said, I would apparently have stood a good chance of being allowed back to normal duty. After that things would probably return to normal and there’d be no reason to suppose that any further complaints would be made against me. I doubt that very much because what has happened to me has happened to several other people; and the outcome of their own disciplinary procedures has been very different. What I strongly suspect would have happened would be that more complaints would soon be made against me, Management would inevitably make more and more demands of me, want more material removed, and have me jump through more hoops generally. The pressure against me would increase until I either couldn’t face it anymore and resigned of my own accord, or got sacked for some other reason. During the investigation meeting back in October I mentioned that I was suspicious that this “complaint” had been received so soon after I had been featured in the national newsprint media and the investigating officer did not reply. Why was this not revealed to me in the investigation meeting? Why were there no references to it in the report other than the pictures? We have an “elephant in the room” situation here. The only real reason I was in trouble was because of me being in the newspapers. As you can see if you take a look, I’ve been running HPANWO for over 5 years and the HPANWO TV channel for nearly as long. I make no secret of this and have many viewers and readers among the hospital’s staff, including managerial grades, yet nobody has ever complained about me before; not once! Nobody has even approached me privately, in a friendly manner, to warn me that I am breaching regulations with my content. Yet now, less than a month after appearing in the newspapers, complaints are flooding in. Am I supposed to believe that this is some kind of bizarre coincidence? Is it also a coincidence that Kevin Annett and some other people I know of have also been harassed when they start speaking out publically in the media about certain subjects, not just given a reprimand or warning, but threatened with losing their career and livelihood!? It seems that there is a hidden policy in place to destroy the careers of people who talk about certain things openly.

The letter of complaint was very strange in tone, as I’ve said above. I can’t help but wonder if this is a genuine letter of complaint from a member of the public or something contrived and fabricated. I realize now I should have seen this coming because I speak out about the same subjects that the other people I refer to do, and they’ve all either been sacked and dragged through the courts or threatened with being sacked and dragged through the courts. These secretly-taboo subjects are, among other things:
1. That children are being abused, and even sometimes murdered, on an institutional level by the state, corporations and Churches.
2. That the attacks on the United States of America on September the 11th 2001 were a false flag military operation carried out by the government itself, rather than the crimes of foreign terrorists.
3. That the Unidentified Flying Objects that are becoming more and more common in the skies above our heads are actually the artefacts of an extraterrestrial civilization, or one that might be “otherworldly” in a different way.
(In my statement underneath all that I wrote: “This list is not exhaustive”. It was a bit of a micky-take and confidence booster because this is a catchphrase Management always likes to use in its documents!)
I added that if the notions on the list above are all “wacko”, “conspiracy theories”, the work of “nut-jobs” etc, then why are our leaders so defensive about them? What I was being accused of here is a Thoughtcrime. I think I’m being persecuted for my beliefs. For example, did the “letter of complaint” include a link to my film Butt’s Winter Wonderland because of Butt’s foul mouth or because the film is a satire against the prevailing theory of man-made climate change? Everything about this case indicated that this is what was happening to me. What is happening here is that people are expected not to express certain viewpoints about certain subjects when off-duty. This is a Thoughtcrime by every definition of the word. I have a completely clean work record and am respected by many of my colleagues, both Portering and civilian. I’ve been running the HPANWO franchise for over 5 years so the question that you should be asking, and any behavioural psychologist will back me up on this, is not: “Does it call into question his ability to perform his duties in the future?” but: “Has it done in the past?” And the answer is an undeniable and resounding “no”. In Devon there’s an MP called Dr Sarah Wollaston who is not only a Member of Parliament with very outspoken anti-establishment views, and who is very critical of current Government NHS policy, but she’s also a practicing GP. I might also add the example of one of the John Radcliffe’s favourite sons and a well-known local character, Dr Evan Harris, until recently another MP and still a man with staunch political views. So you see, if these two people are allowed to be part of an NHS profession and hold political views outside their working hours then so can I. I was always professional and respectful to the patients and other staff. I didn’t preach the subjects I talk about on HPANWO to them when I was on duty. I have never given any cause for complaint in what I do when I’m off-duty before so there’s no reason to think I will do so in the future. The evidence provided in the dossier looks suspiciously like a fabrication and the timing of this incident is beyond what any reasonable person would dismiss as coincidence. For this reason I categorically and emphatically rejected all the allegations made against me.

The chairman listened carefully to me and then replied: “So you don’t want to offer any defence against these allegations?” I answered that this was my defence. He responded: “No, this is not a defence, this is just a reason why you don’t want to make a defence.” I disputed that and the argument went round in circles. Eventually I managed to get Management to respond to my points, but their response was to state that it was not their concern and so not relevent. On the nature of the email they said: “Our job is to investigate complaints made by clients and members of the public. It’s not our place to speculate on whether the letter was written in a particular tone or how long it was or what words it used. All that concerns us is that the complaint was made.” They also dismissed my concerns over the coincidental timing of the “complaint”: “It’s not a part of our duty to ask questions like that. Our duty is to investigate complaints and a complaint has been made. It doesn’t matter when, where or how. It doesn’t matter how it relates to the timing of other events in your personal life.” And so this went on like a stuck record. I suddenly realized that I believed them! These are not the people who want me out of the Hosptial Portering Service; these are the people who were automatically enforcing the will of whoever it was above them who had demanded my removal from the Hospital Portering Service. I doubt if they know any more about the email of “complaint” than I do. They’ve just been told that their superiors want something done and so they do it, with the obedience of soldiers on a parade ground. It is these long, exponentially-increasing networks of administrators and jobsworths that allow a very small number of Elite individuals to impose their will on a vast population. It’s also why this system reacts so brutally against anyone in that chain who doesn’t play their assigned role of obedience; like Kevin, Tony Farrell and me. We are literally fatal to its function.

After this session we took a half-hour break while the panel considered, and then I was called in and the meeting reconvened for the decision. The tone became very formal, like a Crown courtroom with the chairman like a judge. I amused myself by imagining that he had a black cap over his head sentencing me to be hanged. He said that he had given me every attempt available to submit a defence and I had not done so; this is untrue, but, as I said, they refused to accept my defence as a relevant testimony. “You clearly believe that you are the victim of some kind of conspiracy.” He said (“Ha ha!” everybody else thought!). “But we’re not here to listen to a defence based on your beliefs; we are here to consider these allegations based on agreed facts and nothing else; therefore you have not defended yourself at all against these allegations. So therefore my decision is that you are to be deseconded from the company and dismissed from the Oxford University and Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust.” I then realized that what had happened was something I knew all along would happen. All I could do at that point was to make sure that I was discharged with as much dignity as I’d always tried to serve. They asked me if there were any personal belongings in my locker and I told them that I had a brew-kit consisting of some teabags, coffee, powdered milk and sugar; and that I’d like to donate those to the other Porters. When I was asked if there was anything else I'd like to say I replied: “I’d just like to say that if anybody in this room is unhappy with what has taken place here today, and you have any information you think I should know, then please contact me privately in the strictest of confidence.” It was by now almost 5PM, and I was then solemnly escorted to the site entrance from where I walked home.

I don’t feel as sad I thought I would. I think that this experience has taught me that a lot of what I’ve loved about being in Portering has already been lost, and lost a long time before I was called into the Head Porter's office that night last October and suspended. It’s withered slowly over the last few years. A lot of the camaraderie and fun has gone out of the job, and this goes for nursing, medicine and many other NHS professions too. Low pay, more difficult management systems and increasing workload have taken most of the enjoyment out of being in the Health Service. Nowadays people don’t have the time or energy to play; they have to “meet targets” and “deliver services” and “maintain budgets”, and that’s those who are lucky enough to have contracts and are not just seconded from some poxy casual agency. It’s very synchronous that a week or so after I was suspended I heard that the hospital’s Social Club is going to close down in March (See: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/05/st-theos-day-party-2011.html) Estates are withdrawing the lease. I’m frankly surprised that it has lasted this long with the lack of interest in it from the staff. I’ve known people who’ve been at the JR for years and when I mention it they reply: “The Social Club? What’s that?” When I joined the JR the location of the Social Club was an essential part of your basic orientation! Apparently the JRSSC is one of the last social clubs in any NHS hospital in the country. 20 years ago all of Oxford’s four major hospitals along with the JR: the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre, the Churchill and the Radcliffe Infirmary had social clubs. This is a very poignant and revealing symptom of the breakdown of community spirit at hospitals. They’ve lost their soul. This is not by accident, it is by deliberate design, but none of it would be possible without the obedient and robotic rubber-stampers like the ones who have just taken Portering away from me. And this is why I have no regrets about what I did.

This is despite the fact that I also face major financial challenges now as my income stops. I have to find a new one, build a new monetary life for myself. But as I said above, my financial problems are minor compared to other people who have stood up against the hideous machine that society has been made into, so I have to follow in their footsteps. I’ve always said on HPANWO that words are no good unless they inspire action. I’ve done an awful lot of waffling on HPANWO these last 5 years! But waffle is all it is unless I’m willing to do something, to model my own life on my knowledge and principles at a practical level. I feel satisfaction for having done that. In fact if I wasn’t willing to do that then everything I’ve ever written or filmed is worthless and I might as well throw it all away. I should try to remain positive about the future; fortune favours the bold, as they say. When I posted my HPANWO Voice notice on Facebook last night somebody replied: “Maybe this is a time to start writing, Ben”, and maybe that’s true. Perhaps I should see this as an opportunity, an adventure. This experience may liberate tremendous creative forces in my life. In a few years time I might look back and think: “I’m glad that happened!”

One thing I have to do is not to give in to what Andy Thomas talks about when he says: “everything is designed to break our spirit”. I must maintain my identity and personal integrity at all costs. Whatever floods wash over me I must not be carried away with them. I must not be tempted into the seductive lair of Conformism. Maybe this was why that song Feed the Birds was going through my head as I walked to the hospital to attend my hearing. The song is about an old woman who sits on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral in London and sells birdseed to people for 2d a bag, hence the lyrics: “Feed the birds. Twopence a bag”. In the scene in the story, the two children whom Mary Poppins cares for are given twopence by their father and are then faced with a choice: Whether to buy a bag of the old lady’s birdseed or invest it in the bank. The following scene has song about investing money in the bank which is a brilliant satire of materialism, “Twopence, frugally invested in the bank...” see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wzTdW5_2vo This illustrates the choice given to the children in the story: follow the Conformist path to materialism or do something more spontaneous, more spiritual, more free-thinking, more compassionate and emotional, more human. I think I now have that choice too and that song popping into my head was my subconscious mind telling me so!

On a final note, I’d like to think all HPANWO-readers, all HPANWO TV-viewers, all HPANWO Forum-members who have supported and consoled me over these past couple of months. And of course I'd like to pay homage to all my Extremely Proud and Dignified Brother and Sister Hospital Porters. It was an honour to serve alongside you and I intend to stay in touch with you all. Nobody can take you away from me!

Latest HPANWO Voice articles: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2012/01/porter-no-more.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2012/01/leicester-secular-society.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-years-day-2012-race-to-line.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/12/how-come-woo-woos-never-see-santa-claus.html

Latest HPANWO TV films: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/12/its-now-2012.html
And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/12/its-christmas-day.html
And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/12/christmas-lights.html
And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/12/happy-winter-solstice-2011.html

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The Exit of Dennis Potter

Is the world a hologram? This question has become a rather pat truism within the latest alternative paradigm; certainly since the publication of books like Michael Talbot’s Holographic Universe and Tales from the Time Loop by David Icke, the latter of which draws heavily on the former. But is this, if not premature, at least presumptive? What does all that actually mean? Do the people who so often talk about it really know?

Descriptions of this fairly new idea have so far been described better in fictional allegory than scientific books, papers and documentary films. One very good example from cinema is Adrian Lyne’s 1990 chiller Jacob’s Ladder. I first watched this film after seeing it referred to in the excellent book The Spiritual Universe by Fred Alan Wolf. It follows the story of a troubled postman who is being haunted by demons as he makes his way though his everyday life. Mixed in with this are flashbacks to his former life as a soldier in the Vietnam War who is badly injured, and a father to a young boy who gets killed in an accident while riding his bike. As the film progresses it is revealed that the postman was actually killed in Vietnam and that the years of his life since have, it seems, all been a very long and protracted Near-Death-Experience in which his mental landscape formed his outer one. In a scene in which the postman’s friend refers to the 12th century mystical philosopher Meister Eckhart, he explained that the demons the postman perceived were really angels, but because he didn’t understand what they were he saw them as demons. Why is this? Why could one thing be another entirely different thing depending on our state of mind? This somehow struck a chord with me and I searched eagerly for any other information on the subject. Recently I’ve discovered another fictional allegory. It concerns both the work and the life of the writer Dennis Potter. I put the two words together because all of Potter’s best-known work was semi-autobiographical.

Dennis Potter was born in 1935 in Berry Hill, Gloucestershire into a mining family. He began writing in 1965, but never achieved major acclaim until 1986 when the BBC broadcast the serial (What the BBC still rather snobbishly calls a “play”) The Singing Detective. This serial was a huge hit and catapulted Potter into the league of household names. The series was based on the story of a middle aged man who entered hospital to be treated for a bad case of psoriasis, a painful and irritating skin condition that causes sore dermatitis and itchy lesions. The main character was played excellently by Michael Gambon. (The show also contains yet another very negative portrayal of a Hospital Porter which I forgot to mention in this article!: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/10/hospital-porters-in-media.html A young black man who dowdily shunts the main character around whole chewing gum and listening to headphones. See: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2007/12/dont-tell-em-were-porters.html) During the course of his stay in hospital the character explores the world of his memory, drifting back to his childhood in the Forest of Dean, and also a fantasy world he’s created for himself because he’s a writer. As the title suggests, his principle protagonist is a detective who is also a singer; he wears a trenchcoat and trilby hat making him a cliché Chandleresque private eye. The two mental landscapes are blended, with the effortlessly-apt and ingenious wit and style, with the real world of the character, that is Potter’s hallmark. At times, the different worlds become blurred, with characters in the real world acting out scenes from the main character’s fantasy or past. The narrative is accompanied by period popular music, another recurring feature of Potter's drama. His main character, as always, is somebody just like himself: a man of the same age, profession and with the same thoughts and feelings. Like his character, Potter originates from the Forest of Dean. In this way he is not dissimilar to my friend and fellow writer Jude Calvert-Toulmin, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2010/12/heroine-for-internet-age.html . We see this pattern continue in his subsequent serial Lipstick on Your Collar, which was broadcast in 1993. The story is set in England in 1956, on the verge of the Suez Crisis, and the main character in this series was a young man played by Ewan McGregor who is doing his national service as a Russian translator in a British military intelligence office. Again this matches with Potter’s own youthful experience as a Russian linguistic expert at around the same time; and the imagery of the series inspired me to envisage the “WL lab” in my own novel Evan’s Land: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2010/11/evans-land-online.html . This series also included some revolutionary computer-generated special effects. This was the last of Potter’s work that was produced during his lifetime.

In 1994 Dennis Potter died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 59. True to form, he managed to complete a screenplay before his death, his most brilliant in my view. This was produced after he died in a unique collaborative effort between the BBC and Channel 4. It was a two-part series; the first called Karaoke and its sequel Cold Lazarus. Like all Potter’s work his two last plays are typical of his house style: hardbitten, gothic, surreal and darkly humourous. Potter was described by Alan Bennett and his other peers are rather arrogant and incapable of self-criticism. That’s true! But I sometimes think that a certain amount of arrogance is a good thing in literature. It can drive us to achieve excellence, as we define excellence on our own personal terms and this adds colour, richness and variety to the World of Letters. There are many great artistic geniuses who were arrogant to the point of megalomania, but I bet their work wouldn’t have been half as good if they’d felt the need to pander to “Duh Cwitticks” (I have a lot to say on that subject! See: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2008/06/critics.html). If anything I’d say that most writers are not arrogant enough! They’re too eager to please the fickle readership and compromise their uniqueness to the mediocrats of cultural conformity. Another thing I like about Potter is that he refused to bow to Political Correctness; this brutal regime has blunted the literary and performing arts, especially comedy, for several decades now, and it has and bred a climate of fear that is virtually Orwellian in scale; and it’s about time dramatists stood up to it!

The main character in Karaoke and Cold Lazarus is once again the author personified into the story, a man in his late fifties, emotionally troubled and with many physical health problems, the worst of which is the pancreatic cancer that eventually kills him. Karaoke follows the fortunes of a writer, Daniel Feeld, who is working on a TV production of one of his screenplays and he’s played very well by Albert Finney. Feeld finds himself being surrounded by people, total strangers in pubs, passers-by on the street etc, whom he overhears reciting lines of his play in their ordinary conversation. Feeld is bemused and starts questioning his own sanity. He tries to explain what’s happening to his friends, but they don’t believe him; they say it’s a “coincidence” (That word so beloved of Skepperhood, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2010/08/its-just-coincidence.html) or that he’s imagining things. This element of the story is soon overtaken by Feeld’s quest to protect a young woman, who reminds him of his first love, from a brutal gangster who owns the sleazy bar in which she works. Potter’s typical blend between fantasy and reality means she also resembles Feeld’s character in the TV show he’s involved with. In the final scene, Feeld shoots the gangster dead and then returns to the hospital before the police can catch him. Karaoke ends with the mystery of Feeld’s strange experiences unsolved. It is only when you watch Cold Lazarus that you find out, and this is where Jacob’s Ladder and the Holographic Principle comes in. Cold Lazarus is a cyberpunk-ish dystopian sci-fi drama set in the 23rd Century. It turns out that when Daniel Feeld died all those hundreds of years earlier his friends had his head preserved via cryonics, a subject I wrote about on HPANWO long ago: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2007/08/cryonics.html A group of scientists led by a character played very enigmatically by Frances de la Tour have achieved the technology to regenerate Feeld’s cryonically-preserved head and tap into the memories stored inside his brain. They watch episodes of Feeld’s life played out before them rather like a TV show. Some of these involve his childhood in the Forest of Dean in the 1930’s, again just like the author. Others are scenes from his adult life, including the time period covered by Karaoke. A couple of the memories are very harrowing, including an incident as a small child where he is sexually-abused by a tramp in the woods. Others are happy memories, like when he met Beth, a girl he falls in love with and who is played by the same actress, and therefore meant to resemble, Sandra, the girl Feeld shelters in Karaoke. Feeld’s memory of his own death involves a classic Near-Death Experience in which he has an Out-of-Body episode and then goes up a tunnel towards a bright light. Then you hear Feeld scream in distress and he is pulled back down the tunnel and soon the truth becomes clear: Feeld is aware of his situation and is attempting to communicate with the scientists; he is suffering extremely badly and he asks that he be allowed to die. “We’re not studying him, we’re torturing him!” is a good line from the serial. In the end the scientists agree and destroy the laboratory and Feeld’s head; this is just before a media mogul manages to get hold of it and broadcast the memories on his TV channel.

This is where the truth behind the enigma of Karaoke becomes clear and this is why it’s like Jacob’s Ladder. Daniel Feeld’s experiences in Karaoke are actually not real memories, but a world based on his memories, but constructed out of his imagination. The setting of Karaoke is not what it appears to be; it is actually taking place inside Feeld’s frozen head in the Lazarus laboratory in the 23rd Century. The way people keep reciting lines of his play is because they exist purely in Feeld’s imagination. This is exactly the same as the postman in Jacob’s Ladder. The reality of both the postman and Feeld in the two separate films is a mental construct, a very long Near-Death Experience. Both films end with the characters realizing their situation and finally dying for real... But when you examine the themes of these works you have to ask: What is real in the first place? The mind boggles! What if my experience now, sitting in front of a keyboard writing this article, is just taking place inside my mind. I might at this moment actually be a severed head on a laboratory bench in some distant future world. What if the scientists probing these memories I’m experiencing now are just the same, living a constructed life? And so on into infinite regression. This concept has elements that can be found in the very famous film The Matrix. As Morpheus says to Neo: “What is real? If you define “real” as what you can see hear, taste touch or smell then “real” is merely electrical signals from your nerves interpreted by the brain.” According to the physicist Frank Tipler we may well actually all be computer programmes living in a vastly complex virtual reality machine created by super-intelligent beings from the very distant future, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ialY2PgUIKI . The Holographic Principle is one that mainstream physics is only just beginning to come to terms with, but has been discussed by fringe researchers for some time: That everything that makes up reality has a structure that resembles an electronic construct. According to many writers, most recently Anthony Peake, see: http://www.anthonypeake.co.uk/index.php, this can explain phenomena like deja-vu and Synchronicity, something we're all familiar with and I've written about them myself many times. (EG: See my report on Brian Halliwell's speech here: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/10/uk-probe-conference-october-08.html) Recently, especially in the 1990’s, films were produced that explored this concept through fictional allegory, along with scientific books like Michael Talbot’s The Holographic Universe. Dennis Potter’s Karaoke and Cold Lazarus are two of these fictional allegories, less well known than The Matrix, but deserving of the same attention. Like George Orwell feverishly typing away at 1984 in his lonely Scottish island cottage, Potter left us a taunting and intriguing legacy before he left this Holographic Construct... or did he?

You’ll be glad to know that Karaoke/Cold Lazarus can be watched for free online at Channel 4’s YouTube account. Here’s Karaoke: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzW1CpIq468 and here’s Cold Lazarus: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS_BVeMEZJY . (Sorry about all the adverts; it’s the price you pay for free viewing.)

Latest HPANWO Voice articles (All new material): http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/12/debunking-911-myths-in-blackwells.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/12/mens-moisturizing-cream.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/12/lynx-2012-noahs-yacht-advert.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/12/benylin-and-sleep-paralysis.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/12/christopher-hitchens-dies.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/12/my-interview-on-critical-mass-radio.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/12/first-man-to-south-pole.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/12/strange-googe-earth-images-in-gobi.html

Latest HPANWO TV videos (All new material): http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/12/christmas-lights.html
And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/12/happy-winter-solstice-2011.html
And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/12/st-albans-cathedral.html
And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/12/eastenders-studio.html

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Who is Wilbert Smith?

Do you recognize the man in the above photo? I thought I did. I’ve seen this photograph so many times, but always thought it were a portrait of the famous UFO contactee George Adamski, or maybe George King, the founder of the Aetherius Society. It is a photo of a UFO contactee, but one I’d never heard of before. His name is Wilbert Smith and I first heard his tale at the Birmingham UFO Group meeting of the 24th of November 2011. He may well be one of UFOlogy’s greatest unsung heroes. Here’s the BUFOG website: http://bufog.blogspot.com/

My journey to the BUFOG meeting was full of friction and obstacles, usually a good omen that I’m about to have an interesting time, I think. All the trains between Oxford and Birmingham were delayed due to the wrong sort of leaves on the track or something similar and I had to change trains unexpectedly and wait for a long time at Dorridge. I’m ashamed to say that I’m not a man without prejudices and the name “Dorridge” has unfortunately always conjured up images in my head of some chuck of West Midlands suburban sprawl with crumbling red-brick factories and ugly, grey, oblong postwar office blocks. In fact Dorridge is a very clean and neat rural town and its railway station is one of the most charming I’ve ever seen; so I didn’t mind being delayed there a while before completing my journey into Birmingham, and I apologize to anyone offended by my now-eliminated misconception. The meeting ended too late for a journey home so I stayed overnight at the Travelodge in Oldbury. I settled into my room after I arrived and then headed for the venue, negotiating the treacherous roads and flicking through my A to Z at every street corner.

The BUFOG meetings are held at an elegant snooker club in a large and comfortable function room. The speaker was Andrew Johnson (See HPANWO Links), a man all regular HPANWO-readers will be familiar with, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/10/dr-judy-wood-in-brighton.html and: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2010/12/andrew-johnson-newspaper-ad.html . He often speaks at Exopolitics events, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2011/08/exopolitics-leeds-2011.html . Today he was speaking on a subject I’ve never heard him discuss before, but one of the other audience members assured me that Andrew has delivered this speech before elsewhere: Wilbert Smith. Wilbert Smith was born in 1910 in a place called Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. He worked for the Canadian Government as a superintendent of radio regulations. Unlike that other Canadian UFO buff, and also politician, the Rt Hon. Paul Hellyer MP, Smith doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page! He was however an extremely prolific and successful researcher and there are many alternative media sources dedicated him, including even an online edition of one of his books: http://www.rexresearch.com/smith/newsci~1.htm . He was director of something called Project Magnet in the 1950’s. This was an operation set up by the Canadian Government to detect the presence of UFO by searching the sky for electromagnetic anomalies. The aim was to try to work out how these objects were powered and propelled. It’s interesting that the project was set up under the premise that UFO’s were in reality products of an extraterrestrial civilization; before even the Hyneks and Klasses of this world were arguing over whether they even existed! Strangely enough in 1964 the Canadian Government issued a statement that, although Project Magnet had existed as one of their outfits, it was a henceforth going to be merely a private project administered personally by Wilbert Smith and no longer an official government operation at all! According to Andrew this is an act of "offical denial" that came about due to the amazing discoveries made by Smith and his team: confirming the presence of UFO's as real alien artifacts. Despite the project no longer being under their management, the Government allowed Smith access to the facilities to continue his work in his own time and out of his own pocket.

Wilbert Smith’s work didn’t only concern the UFO’s that appear in the sky, he also got involved in research into contactee reports and eventually had direct contact experiences himself. He worked with a woman called Frances Swan who lived very close to Betty and Barney Hill, the famous couple who are wrongly called “The first alien abductees”. Smith had a long-term and significant interaction with an extraterrestrial being whom he called “Tyla”. What was so interesting about this contact was that Tyla instructed Smith in the engineering of unknown esoteric Free Energy and antigravity propulsion systems. He discovered that spinning a disk-shaped object at high speed can induce an antigravity effect. This has been discovered since independently by Mary Bennett and David Percy, authors of the book Dark Moon, see: http://www.aulis.com/nasa3.htm . Also Evgeny Podkletnov of the University of Tampere in Finland did a similar experiment that produced a limited antigravity effect using a spinning ring: http://www.holoscience.com/news/antigravity.html Tyla described himself as a “dustman”, here to clean up the poisons produced by nuclear weapons testing on Earth and he also showed Smith a machine called the “Caduceus Coil” that could tap usable electrical power from the Earth’s magnetic field, just like Nikola Tesla did, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2011/05/nikola-tesla-as-close-as-it-gets.html . Smith also worked on something he called “The Binding Force”, the details of which can be found in his book, see the link above. According to his son Jim, Wilbert Smith was not entirely discarded by all the forces of Government. Some shadow elements kept in touch with him and often employed him in their covert UFO-based endevours; this included several “Roswells” (See: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/03/roswells-galore.html) and Jim, in the same way as Jesse Marcel Jr, once handled a part of the wreckage of a crashed UFO, the “Ottawa Piece”. Smith also dealt with the bodies of aliens from the crashes too.

The legacy of Wilbert Smith continued long after his death in 1962, in fact scientific investigation based on his ideas endures to the present day. One of the biggest and most powerful Military-Industrial Complex aerospace businesses, McDonnell-Douglas, at one point decided to interview UFO experiencers; properly, that it. They planned not only drop by and ask to have a chat with them over a cuppa, but to pay them good money for their time and in exchange for information. The Defence journalist and antigravity agnostic Nick Cook, relates this in his interesting, but sometimes dubious, documentary UFO's- The Secret Evidence, see: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-834605691449249469# (Here's another documentary by Nick Cook, equally slippery in it's accuracy I think, The Billion Dollar Secret: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3975546396136405829#) . Another hint at what’s really going on can be found in the strange behaviour of the Apollo astronauts since the missions which history tells us landed them on the moon. I doubt that this is true, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2009/01/i-went-to-godamn-moon.html , but whether you believe they really did go to the moon or not, this subject is still relevant. I doubt if any of these men will ever confess openly, but they might do quietly and partially. For instance, Neil Armstrong has made some intriguing and incriminating comments. He’s a shy and private man who has little contact with the public, but if you read between the lines of his limited public speeches you might notice something strange, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1vFEwAJZQY “Truth’s protective layers”!? What’s he talking about? I doubt very much if this is what his speech-writer told him to say. Buzz Aldrin has also said some very nebulous things on TV; here he is with Larry King: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDIXvpjnRws . The Apollo 11 crew have revealed that they did see a UFO in space when they were (apprantly) on their way to the moon. Most suspicious of all is the Apollo astronaut whom we in the UFOlogical community have come to admire and trust the most: Dr Edgar Mitchell. Mitchell was a major figure in the late Counterculture period, establishing the Institute for Noetic Sciences near Big Sur, California, the American equivalent of Glastonbury. He’s also a native of Roswell, New Mexico and professes to believe in UFO’s, supporting and agreeing with Roswell researchers who think that a UFO actually did crash there in July 1947. He’s a supporter of the Exopolitics and UFO Disclosure movements and has spoken at their famous press conferences. However Andrew is worried that he may be a shill, a government agent. Apparently the Free Energy inventor Bruce De Palma asked Mitchell’s organization to assist him develop his invention and Mitchell demanded that de Palma sell him the rights. This was not just the development lease contract which de Palma was hoping for, but basically de Palma handing over everything he’d created to Mitchell’s group and never being able to have any say in what happens to it again! De Palma wisely told him “no” at which Mitchell replied with a veiled threat. This is textbook tactics for controlled opposition; it’s happened to many Free Energy inventors sadly; even Nikola Tesla fell foul of this ruse when he got involved with JP Morgan and the Astors. The USA has a great tradition in backyard inventors, part-time amateurs who create marvels on a shoestring budget in their garden sheds, like the Wright Brothers and Thomas Edison. What can happen is that a rich financier from the world of Big Business often approaches these people and offers a “partnership” that involves the inventor selling the rights for a substantial payment. These inventors are usually very short of money and eagerly snap it up. This is most often the first step towards suppression and secrecy. As soon as the contracts are signed the “business partner” takes all the papers and prototypes with the promise to “leave it all in my capable hands. This is going to be a great success!” and that’s the last the world ever hears of it. The most interesting piece of evidence regarding Edgar Mitchell’s secret life comes from a source I don’t normally champion. I find Bart Sibrel’s methods extremely unprofessional and counterproductive, but when he ambushed Mitchell he picked up something unintentionally which many people have understood is extremely significant even if Sibrel himself is too stupid to. Watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTUaZl6Nyho At the end Mitchell’s son says: “Do you want to call the CIA and have them waxed?” What he means by “waxed” I’m not sure; Sibrel predictably makes a joke out of it as the end of his Astronauts Gone Wild! Film, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=487zC8qzRvA But whatever was meant by “waxed” why on Earth would Ed Mitchell be calling the CIA? Bart Sibrel’s business collapsed soon after this film came out and today he works as a lowly cabbie. Maybe that’s because he was “waxed”… then again it could be just because he’s a numpty.

Andrew is extremely suspicious of some of the leading figures in the UFO and Disclosure community, particularly Dr Steven Greer, and I share his suspicions. See: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2010/01/year-ago-dr-stephen-greer-of-disclosure.html I’ve changed my mind a bit since I made this film and have become, if anything, even more cynical of Greer than I was then. He’s done something similar to Ed Mitchell; he has attempted to legally seize the copyright of the UFO photos and footage people capture on his organized skywatches, his so-called “CE5" outings. Andrew takes heart from the fact that he sees Disclosure as something with two streams. The first is the conventional one that the Exopolitics movement is concerned with: campaigning to force governments to declassify their secret information about UFO’s. Both Andrew and I believe that this is probably impossible for reasons I’ve discussed lot recently, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/08/disclosure-is-here-president-admits.html However there’s a second stream of Disclosure, according to Andrew; this is the Disclosure initiated by the extraterrestrials themselves through their contact with ordinary people and their attempts to educate and reveal information to them. That’s good news because the second stream is one that the Shadow Government can do little to prevent!

The BUFOG meeting was a very good event and I’d like to thanks Dave Hodrien and the other organizers for it. And thanks to Andrew for a very interesting and entertaining lecture. After Andrew had finished speaking, Dave revealed some sad news: After much worry and speculation I can now confirm that UFO Matrix magazine has folded. I’ve bought a 2-year subscription and I don’t know if I’ll ever get it back, but really I don’t care. My main feeling of sadness comes from the fact that this was an excellent magazine that had brilliant potential, but it was launched very much against the economic tide. To add insult to injury it failed in its first year. Unfortunately Paranormal magazine has gone the same way, even though it had become quite mainstream and I saw it on sale in many railway station shops. One journal that seems omnipresent even through this Winter of Discontent is the ever-ready Fortean Times. It happens to be the publication that takes the most Skeptical line short of the openly-specialist Skeptic press, like Skeptic magazine, see: http://skeptic.org.uk/. After their disgusting coverage of the Hollie Greig scandal I’ve sworn never to read the Fortean Times again! There is an upbeat ending to this bit of bad news that Dave relayed at the meeting though: Another very informative magazine that has recently closed down UFO Data, is now available free online to download: http://www.ufo-data.co.uk/index1.htm There's plenty here to keep anybody with any interest in UFO's quiet for a while!

I slept well in my bed at the Travelodge and had a relaxing journey home in which all the trains ran on time! I’ll end this article with a speech by Wilbert Smith, in his own words: http://www.disclose.tv/viewvideo/26032/Wilbert_B_Smith___1958_Ottawa_Address

Latest HPANWO Voice articles: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/11/new-ufo-disclosure-petition.html
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And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/11/cctv-in-oxford-taxicabs.html
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The Ark of the Covenant

Mythology is a frustrating thing. One of the main reasons it’s frustrating is because within the norms of Conformist culture it’s just like God: You either believe in it as a preestablished truth or you reject it 100% as nonsense; there is no Third Position; no in-between or middle way. You may either embrace literally a myth that is part of your chosen off-the-shelf package religion or you see it as an entertaining story that is completely imaginary. I’ve spoken before of how I see this as the reason we’ve never solved the mystery of Atlantis, (See EG: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/05/beyond-knowledge-conference-2008.html) but lately I’ve come across another historical conundrum that is similarly afflicted: The Ark of the Covenant.

The Ark of the Covenant is the most enigmatic historical artifact and religious relic in the world. It first appears in mythology in the Bible; the Book of Exodus. In one of the best-known stories ever told, Moses leads his fellow Israelites out of slavery in Egypt to Mount Sinai. He ascends the mountain to the summit, a place of pilgrimage in modern times, where God descended in a storm cloud flanked by two cherubim blowing ram's horn trumpets and gave Moses the Ten Commandments. God carved the text of the Ten Commandments onto a pair of stone slabs with his finger (Does God really have fingers!?) and Moses brought them down from the mountain after, in the best of Biblical tradition, forty days. God told Moses to build a wooden box to carry the stone tablets in. As He did with Noah, God gave a very precise design blueprint for the box. The box was to be oblong in shape, measuring 2.5 by 1.5 by 1.5 Royal cubits in dimension, that’s 3.75 x 2.25 x 2.25 feet. It was to be made of acacia-wood timber and covered all over with solid gold plating. Similar acacia-wood carrying-staves were inserted into four gold rings built into the side and the staves were never to be removed even when the box was standing on the ground. The box was to be covered with a golden lid with similarly golden figurines of the two cherubim that accompanied God set on top (God Himself, of course, was never portrayed in an image). This box was to be called the Ark of the Covenant. According to some myths other objects were placed in there too: a facsimile of the original tablets, also inscribed by God’s finger, after the originals were smashed by Canaanite idolaters, who took over while Moses went away for a while. Also it is said to contain Moses’ own first hand-written Torah, Aaron’s Rod and several other Israelite heirlooms. This was long before the building of the famous Temple of Jerusalem and the Israelites were a nomadic culture at that time so they carried the Ark with them wherever they went, which must have been quite a burden seeing as it was partly made of solid gold! Whenever they stopped and set up camp the Ark was placed inside a sacred mobile shrine called the Tabernacle which consisted of a special tent that only Moses and the Ark’s vanguard could enter; this tent was also set up to very specific dimensions dictated by God (Maybe this is why the Masons call God “the Great Architect”). The Ark was more than just a ceremonial antique though; it was also a very powerful weapon of war that was a channel of God’s power on Earth. In fact the Israelites defeated several enemies by using the Ark; most famously the Ark destroyed the fortified walls of Jericho after God told the army to march around it 7 times (7 is another recurring number in the Bible) brandishing the Ark. After 40 years (that number again!) of wandering in the wilderness the Israelites installed the Ark permanently in Solomon's great Temple of Jerusalem. The home of the Ark was in an inner sanctum known as the “Holiest of Holies” into which only the most senior high Levite Priests were permitted to enter. This Temple was destroyed and rebuilt several times and today all that remains of it is the Wailing Wall, but what happened to the Ark that lay inside it? After the final sacking of the Temple by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BC the Ark is never mentioned again in the Old Testament. This is strange; you’d think that whether the Ark survived or was destroyed, the authors of the Bible would have something to say about its fate. This was the most prized national treasure that the Israelite people possessed, designed by God, built by the founder of their nation and containing a specimen of God’s own handwriting. This is the God revered by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. So what happened to it? According to the Book of Revelations the Ark ascended into Heaven and St John saw it when the Temple gates were opened in one of his visions. However usually these kinds of ascensions are very dramatically noted at the time they happen, as with Mary, but not this one. It’s as if God whipped the Ark out of the back door as Nebuchadnezzar’s armies were marching up the drive; that’s not God’s style.

As with the Holy Grail, since the Ark vanished from history and legend, several theories have arisen as to where it might be right now. These theories have spawned many fictional accounts, such as Stephen Spielberg’s celebrated film, Raiders of the Lost Ark, the first in the Indiana Jones series. In this film the Ark is hidden in Egypt. It’s also said to be located in Ireland, England, Jordan, France, South Africa and Italy. But by far the most likely story is that the Ark went to Ethiopia; how the Ark ended up there is a long and interesting story, but there’s also archaeological evidence that it is a true one. Ethiopia is an ancient and unique country, almost unknown to the outside world until it tragically shot into the global headlines the 1980’s, when a famine wiped out millions of its people and this inspired rock stars to come together in the first ever international concert to raise money to save them. In fact the country deserves notoriety for other more positive reasons. It is home to one of the most archaic and fascinating religious traditions on Earth. It has both an unusual orthodox Christian church and a very old Jewish tradition. There are two stories of how the Ark of the Covenant arrived in Ethiopia. One of them states that the Ark was not destroyed during the Babylonian conquest at all; not because God had managed to get it out of the way, but because the Ark had been removed before then, over 200 years before then in fact. The theory goes that the Ark was taken by Jewish refugees when a usurper-king called Manasseh came to power. Manasseh is portrayed in the Bible as a deeply wicked man who brought down the Kingdom of Israel with much brutality and then committed a gross blasphemy by installing a pagan idol in the Temple. The Jewish loyalists fled and it seems reasonable that they would save the Ark by taking it with them. But where would they flee to? This was a big question that’s not easy to answer. However we can suppose that wherever they went to there would be historical and archaeological evidence for their presence because such a high class of refugees would have a great impact on the surrounding area, its culture and traditions. In fact they’d enjoy a similar status as the Dalai Lama and his Tibetan Buddhist followers do today. It seems likely that they would desire to build a new temple, maybe not quite as grand as Solomon’s original one in Jerusalem, but still substantial. Does a record of any such presence exist?

Yes it does. If you travel up the river Nile into southern Egypt you come across a small and apparently insignificant island called Elephantine; this is right on the ancient trade routes between Africa and Palestine. On this island during the time of King Manasseh’s regime a large and powerful Jewish expatriate community emerged and the ruins of their buildings can be seen to this day on the island. Among them is a huge temple complex; at the time, this was the only Jewish Temple in the entire world to be built other than the main one in Jerusalem. It must have been a very special place for Jews during this early Diaspora, perhaps special enough to be the new home of the Ark of the Covenant? Unfortunately the relationship between the Elephantine Jews and their Egyptian asylum-granters was rather shaky. This was because the Jews still practiced animal sacrifice, especially prime rams, at a time when the local Egyptians were worshipping a ram-god called Khnum. The conflict came to a head in 410 BC and the result was that the Jews were evicted from Elephantine. The Egyptians then demolished the Temple. Where would the Jews go from there? Not north for sure because there lay Egypt and they would have surely have been under exile as a result of their eviction, and beyond Egypt lay their arch-enemy Manasseh. To the West was nothing but the endless Sahara Desert and to the east the Red Sea. So they could only have gone south. Upriver on the Nile lay some very green and pleasant lands like Kush, Ophir and Nubia, the region today called Ethiopia.

The second legend is a native Ethiopian one and is today the foundational doctrine of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. It concerns a well-known, but very tenuous and mysterious historical character: the Queen of Sheba. The story goes that the Queen of Sheba came from one of the countries in what is now Ethiopia and lived in the early 9th Century BC, just when the Temple in Jerusalem had been built. On a state visit to Jerusalem she had a fling with King Solomon through which she became pregnant. Her baby became King Menelik I. When he came of age the young king went back to Jerusalem to remind his estranged father of his responsibilities. A deal of some kind was struck which meant that Menelik was given the Ark of the Covenant to take to Ethiopia on condition that he imposed the Judaic faith and culture on his people. He did so and the Jewish tradition in that country endures into the modern era. I find this tale slightly dubious. Sure I know that paternity feuds can be very bitter and costly indeed to the paternal party, but there’s no way Solomon would hand over the Ark. It would be better if he handed over the rest of the entire nation and kept the Ark. Remember what this artifact meant to his people; it was literally a direct gift from God. Also if Menelik had taken the Ark it would mean that the Ark would have been removed from the Temple in Jerusalem just a few short years after the thing had been built! What a waste of effort! Whichever of these tales is the right one there is very strong evidence that the Ark ended up in Ethiopia. Its first sanctuary was Lake Tana. Archaeologists had to visit the extremely remote and isolated Monastery of Debre Damo to discover this secret. This mountain fortress was sealed off from the outside world for over 1500 years and can only be entered by shinnying up a leather rope to a doorway 60 feet up on a sheer cliff face. There, the location of where the Ark was held was revealed. I say was, not is; but bear with me.

Lake Tana is the source of the Blue Nile, the final destination that the Jewish exiles from Elephantine would have come to by following the river. The lake is huge and is covered by many islands, some of them isolated monasteries on which outsiders were forbidden. The area is held sacred by the Ethiopian people and has been used as a fortress to guard national treasures during the frequent occasions when the country has come under attack from an outside enemy or internal strife. The most inaccessible and exclusive of all these outposts is the island of Tana Kirkos. It is almost totally undiscussed; even most Ethiopians have never even heard of it. Here both local legends and archaeological evidence agree that something of enormous spiritual and historical value was kept here. In Part 3 of this TV show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOqLpT6HKzY we see the location where a new Tabernacle may have been erected. The socket holes in the rock match the very precise God-given measurements from tradition, ones that the Jewish priests would have very solemnly and reverently reproduced on the ground of this foreign land. In Part 4 you’ll see that nearby is a very regal grave, maybe the last resting place of the chief Levite Priest who led the expedition. Also in Part 4, you’ll see that the islanders of Tana Kirkos possess sacred objects that they say were brought by the Jewish refugees and show them to the camera. The Ark was kept on Tana Kirkos for 800 years and then, in the 4th Century AD when Ezana, the first Christians king of Ethiopia, sat on his throne, this most holy treasure was moved to the Royal city of Aksum.

For over 600 years Aksum was the centre of a prosperous Christian empire and the heart of its power lay in its sacred core, the Cathedral of St Mary of Zion, the place where the Ark of the Covenant has rested for the last 1600 years. Today the home of the Ark is a surprisingly modest building, a small chapel-like structure in the grounds of what is today a fairly average-sized newly-rebuilt cathedral. It is called The Church of the Tablet and was built in the 1950’s by Emperior Haile Selassie’s wife after the Ark began to cause damage to its original storage site in the old cathedral; I’ll explain how and why such damage might be done in a moment. However this sanctuary is a place of great veneration and on festival days thousands of people will gather in the streets of Aksum as a Tabot, an effigy of the Ark that is always used in Ethiopian church services, is paraded through the city with enormous reverence. As for the real Ark? That’s an entirely different matter. The real Ark never leaves the little chapel and nobody is allowed near it except the Keeper. The post of Keeper of the Ark of the Covenant has got to be the most exclusive and carefully-vetted job application that exists. He is a man who is the most trusted and dedicated of all the Ethiopian clergy selected in a way that makes the Papal Conclave look casual. He and he alone is permitted to enter the Church of the Tablet and look upon the Ark. He takes vows to tend the Ark and do nothing else ever again; he never leaves the small chapel compound and never leaves his job until the day he dies. Under no circumstances is anybody else allowed near the Ark. This is apparently more for their own protection than that of the Ark. The Ark, it seems, can easily take care of itself! More on that in a moment, but one thing is for certain: anybody who goes on a quest for the Ark will eventually end up in only one place: outside the high security railings surrounding the Church of the Tablet. The Ark will lie just a dozen feet away from them but for all the chance they’ll have of viewing it, it might as well be on Mars! Of course in a region as volatile and unstable as northern Ethiopia there’s always a risk that in a period of disorder somebody might try to force entry to the chapel and look at the Ark, or even try to steal or destroy it. If that happens then I’ve no doubt that it will be over the Keeper’s dead body… but maybe it will be over the perpetrator’s too.

As I said, it appears that the Ark is more than just a relic; it has an awareness and intelligence of its own and it seems quite capable of defending itself, often greatly to the detriment of its attacker. There are many stories of what happens to people who try to abuse the Ark, one of them is Biblical. The Ark was captured once by the Philistines after a battle in which they thrashed the Israelites so badly that the Tabernacle was overrun. The Ark was carried back to their homeland in triumph and placed in their own temple. The Israelites were devastated, thinking they’d lost their most priceless treasure forever. However 7 months later the Philistines came to the Israelites and offered to return the Ark unconditionally. This was because since the Ark had been in their possession their entire country had been beset by terrible misfortune, in particular the people had all fallen ill with plagues and tumours. The Ark was exceptionally choosy about whom it had around it. It brought great success and protection to the Israelites, but to anybody else it didn’t like, it brought disaster and death. This factor of the story was included into the climax of Stephen Spielberg’s film about the Ark. Apologies for the spoiler, but what happens is that it appears that all is lost. Indiana Jones and the heroine are tied up awaiting execution and the Nazis open up the Ark to test it. Immediately they’re struck down by fire and die in a very gruesome scene which gave me nightmares as a child. The Ark, so the stories go, has a willpower all of its own and will react very violently if you try to harness it to your own devices. But this is just a story isn’t it? Just ancient myths and a film script? Maybe not, because the Keepers of the Ark in Aksum say the exact same thing. They don’t only keep ordinary people away from the Ark as an act of respect for the Ark’s sacred status, but to protect them from the Ark!

You may be wondering why I’ve decided to write about this subject. Am I about to turn religious? Do I believe the literal truth of the Ark’s origins? Am I now going to try and persuade you that God really did come down to Moses and write on stone tablets with his own hand? No! Definitely not! I’m not going to suggest that the legends associated with the Ark of the Covenant are the absolute truth of its origins; but then again, as I said at the start of this article, I’m not sure that we can just dismiss the entire phenomenon of the Ark as make-believe. The Ark may well be a real object of enormous physical, energetic and/or spiritual power that was found by tribesmen in Palestine 3000 or so years ago, and the Bible stories and Ethiopian fables were legends that grew up around factual accounts and experiences of it over the ages. Graham Hancock (see HPANWO Links column) has speculated that it might be some form of high technology; I think it may be part of a Roswell-style “flying disk”. There’s no way to be sure, but in 2008 the History Channel said in one of its programmes that the Keepers of the Ark usually don’t live very long; they are quickly struck down by maladies like cataracts and other conditions associated with exposure to excessive radiation. It might be some kind of interdimensional object, portal or energy field; or even something else altogether that we can’t even imagine. Whatever it is, it is without a doubt the most incredible relic in the entire world. It has seized the imagination of the people who’ve come into contact with it for over 3000 years… and sometimes their lives too. We will probably never know, unless for some hitherto unimaginable reason the Ethiopian priesthood decides to bring the Ark out and put it on public display, but that is so unlikely that it hardly deserves a second thought. However on the 25th of June 2009 the patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church said that he would unveil the Ark the following day; when the following day arrived he said he’d changed his mind!
(Sources: Raider of the Lost Ark, Hational Geographic and Grahamhancock.net)

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And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/11/david-icke-in-sun.html

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