Paranormal Engineering Corps

Meet Bear! Future K-9 paranormal investigator!

Haunted Southern California and California’s Haunted Route 66 by Brian Clune. These two books from the Haunted America series were excellent. I was specifically looking for places in So Cal that I didn’t know about so I could research some more. I’m trying to find more places in the desert since the Los Angeles and San Diego haunts are pretty well known. From these books, I think I’ll try to check out Oro Grande above Victorville, and the Harvey House Train Depot in Barstow. There’s also several interesting spots in Pasadena. The research that Brian put into these is extensive. For each location you get a few pages of history followed by the paranormal goodies and reports. You can tell that he’s actually been to these places and interviewed or even befriended the locals. I can’t wait to try it some of these places myself. Happy hunting!

USS Midway at night.

They’re Here! My poster came in from the Project Gravitaur’s S4: The Bob Lazar Story. The poster is a replica of one that Bob Lazar saw hanging on the walls at the S4 facility. Maybe for morale? Bob Lazar even signed it for me with a best wishes! It costs extra but it was still very nice of him. I bought it from his company’s website, United Nuclear, but Project Gravitaur also sells them. S4 was great if you haven’t seen it. It really helps you understand what he saw and experienced with their carefully crafted cgi. Now my garage has the ultimate Area 51 touch! But I could not get a good picture without all the reflection from my glass frame lol. Does anybody know if this inspired the X-Files “I want to believe” poster in Mulder’s office?

The Night Side of Nature by Catherine Crowe first published January 1, 1848. This book pre-dates the London Ghost Club and Society for Psychical Research. Crowe organizes at least one hundred ghost stories into categories and both educates the reader on the current scientific understanding they have about the phenomenon and her opinions or areas she would like to study further. It’s far more educated than something you would expect for the time. She spends a lot of time chastising people in science who dismiss the paranormal out of hand as superstition. So I guess nothing much has changed there. She also complains at some point that a lot of idiots believe in the paranormal which drags down scientific efforts which I thought was hilarious, lots of shade! I would say almost all of the stories come from a wealthier class of society in order to lend credibility to the stories. She talks about will in the same way that parapsychologists talk about psi, so I think that concept was relatively the same back then. She calls sensitive people Seers or people with the sight, same as the Secret Commonwealth … Fairies book. The view on poltergeists is still the old theories which were revised by Nandor Fodor and modern parapsychologists. The modern theory is that poltergeists are caused by a living agent and not an apparition, so some progress there. There were a lot of crisis apparitions mentioned which still happen today but seem less prevalent then back then. There are also a lot of wraiths and doppelgängers which in this context would mean people were seeing themselves or friends/family in places they shouldn’t be. This could be astral projection or residual hauntings, but there is also a heavy lore here where seeing this type of ghost means that you will die soon. She brought up issues with apparitions such as, why do they always have clothes on? So several times she alludes to the phenomenon being a phenomenon of the mind which is exactly the modern belief of parapsychology. She had a few more points that I can’t remember so I’ll need to go back and find them. It was long at over 500 pages so I should have taken better notes. Conclusion in the comments…

Attempting to watch the Artemis II re-entry on coast of San Diego with a Space Camper!