Thursday, November 05, 2009


Paranormal Expo: How About A Quartz Mothership?

(Wrapping up my coverage of the Paranormal Expo held in Plattsburgh, NY on October 24th.)


UFOs and haunted houses and everything in between.

The guest speakers at the Paranormal Expo covered it all.

Dan Lowenski, UFO specialist, didn't come across as either a complete skeptic or true believer. During his slideshow presentation he referred to various cases, some puzzling, but he didn't flat out say that he believed that every case was true, that hoaxes and misidentification never happened. With his background in law enforcement, he presented a balanced view of ufology.

Part of the slideshow showed a training exercise once conducted in the Adirondack forest with a mock up of a crashed UFO. Codenamed Project Diogenes, the participants located the mock UFO and conducted an investigation, a simulation of what should be done if an alien craft did actually crash. Lowenski said the exercise was done years ago with a limited budget; that's why the “special effects” of the crash weren't top quality.

During the Q&A after Lowenski's presentation, a woman in the audience mentioned a case involving a Japanese airline pilot who had encountered an UFO. (I think she was referring to the incident back in 1986 when a pilot for Japan Air Lines observed a gigantic UFO over Alaska.) She stated that the night it happened, she saw the alien mothership over Plattsburgh.

The last presentation of the day dealt with an investigation into a haunted house in the region. The home owner said he was a skeptic until unnerving occurrences happened in the old house he had bought and was renovating. Some local paranormal investigators – affiliated with an organization founded by his brother-in-law – encountered all sorts of weird stuff. This all seemed to be caused by the spirit of a mentally disabled woman who lived in the house a long time ago.

Someone in the audience asked if an attempt was going to be made to release the spirit. The lead investigator and the home owner explained that there was a lot of quartz in the stone walls of the house and in the ground where the house sat. Quartz, it was mentioned, is a material that strongly binds spirits.

UFOs, ghosts, new agers and crystals – sometimes it all ties in for some people like those who attended the PExpo.


1 comment:

X. Dell said...

Well, there has to be some sort of consistency for a belief structure to take hold. Moreover, there has to be something in it that one can observe and verify. The man is shown a correlation between anomalous events and quartz, and finds that a satisfactory explanation because it answers all his questions, at least at that time, in a way that's consistence to the evidence he has. Where the real wisdom comes in is when one sees more questions than the explanation can answer. One has to either expand the previous explanation to encompass unfitting data, change his/her paradigm, or, as is most often the case, ignore the data.