Interview with StrayedAway

 

See here for essential background: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2018/03/twitter-voicemail-update.html.
And: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2018/03/strange-voicemail.html.
Ty, aka @StrayedAway, has been interviewed. A YouTuber called "Shane" has tracked him down and the two of them have had a phone conversation. This happened soon after the original voicemail incident, so I must apologize to HPANWO readers for not picking up on it back then. Ty had actually returned to Twitter under the handle @HOMOC1DE. I assume this is an alternation of "homicide", murder in other words; which is an odd name to give himself after all his previous terrified blurts. Erin Mahoney was not the only user wondering if Ty had just made the whole thing up. I doubted that for reasons I explain in the background links above, but could I be wrong? Ty explains what I guessed, that he had deleted his @StrayedAway account because it was now permanently associated with the weird voicemail. Also, sadly typical of social media, he received abusive and threatening messages. These were not confined to him alone. His family did too and his male partner was subjected to homophobic insults. Ty repeats the same basic story he told via his Tweets. The voicemail was real and was received exactly in the manner he described. He did not influence any of the subsequent analysis and so cannot comment on the various theories, except that he did suspect it was something from the government that he received by mistake, and I agree with him. He does not believe in most conspiracy theories, as I predicted. The late night photographer was also a real event and I can understand why it frightened him. He doesn't think this was a prank played on him by family or friends because they would surely have confessed by now, or he would have exposed them. It was also probably not what Shane theorizes, a random targeted joke. Ty does not fit the profile of a fertile dupe for a charade of this nature. Somebody who believes in the esoteric, but is also irrational and volatile would be a better victim. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbwR_uHhiI0. Listening to Ty speaking live is enlightening because it makes me more certain that this whole thing was not a hoax. I never bought into the MH370 angle because, as I said at the time, I worked out independently that the grid coordinates, if that's what they were, relate to a place in Gabon, not Malaysia. Despite this, the ideas of an aircraft's occupants being nonhuman has come up more recently with the "crazy plane lady", see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2023/09/crazy-plane-lady-update.html. I'm not saying there's a definite connection; I'm just curious. I don't think the supposed voice on the pilot's final radio transmission was a voice; in fact it sounds more like electronic interference, the kind that it quite common on wireless communications. Ty's interview clears up one part of the mystery, but the central question remains; who did this and why? Who sent the message and who was the correct recipient meant to be? What does the message really refer to? Ty has not learned anything further in that regard and neither, it seems, has anybody else.
See here for more background: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2024/05/mh370-portal.html.

Sycamore Gap

 

I'm sad to report that the famous sycamore tree beside Hadrian's Wall has been cut down. The three hundred year old tree was a major landmark, standing alone in a gulch through which the wall passed. Hadrian's Wall is one of the oldest, and certainly the biggest, building in Britain; it is a world heritage site. The vista of the tree standing in the dip has become a classic one and there are many photographs of it; and it is often an outdoor setting for films and TV programmes. It was felled by a sixteen year old boy with a chainsaw. His motives are currently unknown. Source:  https://news.sky.com/story/sycamore-gap-tree-second-person-arrested-in-connection-with-felling-of-iconic-landmark-12972772. JRR Tolkien grew up on the outskirts of what at the time was the fastest growing city in the world, Birmingham. He spent his childhood watching forests and copses being knocked over to make way for roads, houses and factories. This is probably why he seemed to regard the destruction of trees as the very essence of barbarism. We see this in the Lord of the Rings films, for example when Saruman pulls down all the trees in the parkland around Isengard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qK7cweKy64. There are many scenes of tree destruction in the book that are not reproduced in the films. Recently I reported on how a proud and ancient tree was cut apart because it stood in the way of the HS2 track, see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2020/10/tree-felled-for-hs2.html. In that case it was big government and globalist multinationals giving orders to what Heathcote Williams called "blind dwarves", the eastern European immigrants employed on the minimum wage to wield chainsaws without thought or feeling. Why did this young boy cut the Sycamore at Hadrian's Wall? For fun? For the prestige he will enjoy among his schoolmates for "doing a dare"? He has grown up in a meaningless world alien to his ancestors. People in the past understood meaning because they lived in sacred times. Maybe his stupidity is inevitable as we witness the triumph of profane, nihilistic, mercenary and degenerate times. If only there were real Ents! The good news is that the vandal left the stump and roots still standing. They appear to be viable for coppicing, meaning the tree will regrow. However it will be a couple of centuries before it can regain its former glory.

See here for more information: https://hpanwo-bb.blogspot.com/2022/07/the-stag-and-stones-poem.html.

A Spy Among Friends

 

There is yet another dramatization about the real life of Kim Philby, a high level MI6 double agent. This time it is a six part filme noire starring Guy Pierce in the eponymous role, an actor best known for soap operas. A Spy Among Friends is based on the non-fiction book by Ben McIntyre. Kim Philby led one of the most successful penetrations of western intelligence in the history of the Cold War. One of the "Cambridge spies", he rose to the highest ranks of MI6 and was even head of Soviet counterespionage; the irony is overwhelming. It was thanks to his insider knowledge that his fellow Cambridge spies, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, escaped capture and fled the country in May 1951. However this intervention began the process that would lead to his own exposure. In 1956 he moved to Lebanon to work as a freelance journalist. He had lost his security clearance and so could only work for British intelligence as an agent. For a while things settled down, but then in 1961 a top-level KGB officer defected and gave information to the CIA which confirmed Philby as the "third man" (in reality he was actually the fifth, but at that time John Cairncross and Anthony Blunt had not been caught.). MI6 were not sure how to deal with the situation seeing as Philby was no longer one of their officers and didn't live in the UK anymore, so they couldn't just go up and arrest him. On the other hand if they made up some excuse to try and coax Philby into returning to Britain he might smell a rat. In the end they chose an unusual tactic, Philby's best friend and fellow MI6 officer, Nicholas Elliot, went to Lebanon to try and persuade Philby to confess. Elliot turned up at Philby's flat in Beirut and talked to him for a long time while plying him with beverage; which was not difficult because Philby was a functioning alcoholic. There was a hidden microphone in the flat and every word was recorded. The recording and transcript remain classified to this day and there is much speculation about what was actually said; however many researchers believe that Elliot instructed Philby to "do a fade", that is, disappear and seek refuge in the Soviet Union like Burgess and Maclean had done a decade earlier. Why? Because if he had brought the law down on Philby, publicly extradited and prosecuted him, it would have caused enormous embarrassment to the British intelligence community. At that time the service was still reeling from the trial of George Blake, see background links below and: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2020/12/george-blake-dies.html. Either way, soon after this meeting Philby vanished and turned up a few months later in Moscow. At the end of the series there is a subtle but powerful hint that Sir Roger Hollis is also a double agent. This accusation was made by Peter Wright in "the book they tried to ban!" thus certifying its popularity, Spy Catcher. Sir Roger in the series is played unusually by an actor most renowned for his comedy, Adrian Edmondson. He was head of MI5 during the heart of the cold war. He has officially been exonerated, but so was Kim Philby once...
 
This gritty and intense drama would have been very good and could have been very good. All the acting was excellent and the script witty and expressive; but it was, like so many stories these days, ruined by wokery. There is a character in it called Lily Thomas, a plain and everyday woman from the northeast, "Durham not Newcastle" as she keeps reminding everybody. She is a tough and sassy cracker in charge of internal security who is continuously portrayed subjecting upper-class white males to humiliating putdowns and scathing interrogations. As I've said before, like here: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2023/07/messiah.html, characters like her are not really characters at all, they are just overused concepts. Mrs Thomas is married to a black man because she could never bear to touch filthy white skin and her husband is a doctor, thus reminding the viewer that black people can be clever too; had you forgotten? There are many unnecessary and self-indulgent scenes of domestic bliss between Lily and her husband, including one very unrealistic occasion when she is studying the Philby confession tape from a player on her kitchen table. As if a sensitive piece of MI6 information was something she could just take back to her house for the night to catch up on it. At the end of the series there is a brief pre-credit biography of all the real individuals' continuing stories and at the end the statement: "Lily Thomas never existed." Why put that information into the conclusion of the series? They're obviously trying to make the point that things would have been so much better if she had existed. If only there had been a "Strong!" "Empowered!" "Independent!" "Woman!" involved in the inquiry then the scandal caused by "White!" "Straight!" "Posh!" "Men!" could have been avoided. What insulting nonsense! If you want to see a fictional work based on the Kim Philby story then there are far better ones. I particularly like the film A Different Loyalty staring Rupert Everett as Philby, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0xAUehXw2s. It is based on the autobiography of his wife Eleanor Brewer, played by Sharon Stone. The director is Marek Kanievska who made another brilliant movie, Another Country, about the early life of Guy Burgess, played again by Everett. There is also a documentary with fictionalized scenes by Ben Macintyre based also on his book called Kim Philby- His Most Intimate Betrayal. This refers not just to his wife but to his best friend, Nicholas Elliot.
See here for more background: https://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2020/01/spies-of-london-part-1.html.
And: https://hpanwo-bb.blogspot.com/2021/04/the-obscurati-chronicles-sample-fourth.html.

Peat Burning

 

Peat is the world's oldest fossil fuel. It has been used for heating and cooking food since prehistoric times. It is also the world's only renewable fossil fuel (I think oil is not really a fossil fuel, but that's a big subject). Unlike coal which takes millions of years to form, peat can form within a few millennia. It is caused by the breakdown of biological matter in stagnant water or soil where there is not enough oxygen for normal decomposition. The use of peat is controversial though because it has the highest carbon dioxide emissions of all the fossil fuels, therefore Scotland has banned the sale of peat, see: https://www.gov.scot/news/ending-the-sale-of-peat-in-scotland/. If you believe that human carbon emissions cause climate change then surely there are bigger fish to fry. I understand why starting wildfires on peat lands is destructive, not because of its carbon emissions but because it destroys a valuable ecosystem; however there are power stations spewing out acrid coal smoke all over the earth. China is opening six new coal fired power stations a week. Only ten power stations in the entire world are fired by peat; in Estonia, Finland, Ireland and Russia. Rwanda has two currently under construction. In the British Isles peat fuel is more used by independent families and communities in rural areas. It is usually dug up by hand and dried out on farms. The photograph above is of peat gatherers at Westhay, Somerset in 1905. I once stayed at a croft in northwest Scotland which was miles from anywhere. It had no electricity or running water. We had to get water from a well and purify it with chemicals. The only light was from candles and oil lamps. We cut lumps of peat out of a nearby meadow and carried it back to a shed to dry. The shed was about twenty feet away from the house to lower the fire risk and when the lumps were dry we used them for the hearth and stove. This kind of practice is miniscule compared to mainstream energy generation, so what's wrong with it? Maybe the attacks on peat burning are motivated by an agenda to eliminate traditional European lifestyles. It wouldn't be the first time; in fact immigration centres are deliberately being built in small towns to achieve that. Mahatma Gandhi called villages "fortresses of culture" with good reason. At the same time, the government also want to impose a new road speed limit of 20 mph which in rural areas is absurd nanny-state nonsense. It is also bad for cars' engines. The Welsh parliament, Y Senedd Cymru, is only too happy to comply, as usual, and is rushing to introduce this limit. It seems that the so-called "Celtic" nations are always the pioneers of every Big Brother reform. It cannot just be my imagination that there is an acceleration of all new measures to bring about internationalism and authoritarianism.
See here for background: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2021/11/climate-change-portal.html.

Gayle Fidler on Gef

 

Following Richard's video about our Isle of Man mission, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2023/09/richard-freemans-quest-for-gef.html, another member of the expedition, Gayle Fidler, has done her own report for the Spooky Isles webzine, see: https://www.spookyisles.com/in-search-of-gef-the-talking-mongoose. The article is a dialogue between Gayle and members of LAPIS and mentions a new film about to be released about Gef, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yua1KVzAmRA; I'll look forward to seeing that. The idea for the project came from where the best ideas always come from, some drinks at a pub. This year's was the team's third trip to the Isle of Man; obviously we had to take time off for the pandemic. On previous trips, Dan has also been along with Steve who's a pagan. I wanted to go to those two as well, but had to cancel for various reasons; third time lucky! The presence of mongooses on the island is certain, or at least it used to be. They were released from the house we stayed in, Eary Cushlin, in 1912. Jenny Randles claims to have seen a mongoose during her own visits to the island. One of the things we wanted to find out was if any mongooses are still alive there. It's possible, but of course we didn't expect to find another that could talk. Gayle was accompanied as usual by her husband Ben, who is not to be confused with me. We are both equally bald, but Gayle's Ben is usually seen walking round in a black kilt; and you'll never see me wearing that. I was surprised that most of the Manx people we spoke to did not believe in Gef. They cynically denounce it as a money making scam by the Irvings. It's a shame because Gef could be a goldmine for the Isle of Man. They could build a tourist industry based on him in the same way Roswell does with its UFO crash, and there's nothing wrong with that, see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2013/04/roswell-upon-avon.html.

Richard Freeman's Quest for Gef

 

The irrepressible Richard Freeman has released a video about our recent trip to the Isle of Man to find the legendary Gef the talking mongoose. In his own unique style Richard tells the story in a special episode of On The Track, the news series from the Centre for Fortean Zoology see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEKVm5K07nc. It includes his own footage from Doarlish Cashen, the séance, the wallaby spotting, the incident where Jackie saw Richard being thrown around in bed, the ghost hunt at the theatre in Peel and the infamous scene where Richard examines the droppings we found in the ruins of the Irving's house. There is an accompanying article in the latest edition of Fortean Times, October 2023.
See here for my HPANWO TV reportage of the expedition: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2023/07/of-mongoose-and-man.html.

J Posadas at the CCS

 

I returned once again to a meeting of the Oxford Communist Corresponding Society because they were hosting a presentation about J Posadas, the maverick Argentine socialist who expressed an interest in UFO's; although only in one piece of writing, it turns out, which indicates he was not as interested in the subject as I had previously thought. I was keen to go to this meeting because I thought it was important to "fly the woo-woo flag", so to speak. To the credit of the CCS, they are the only organization in Oxford that I know of which regularly covers UFO and paranormal topics. General interest in J Posadas has increased in the last few years. A creative meme culture has grown up around him and in 2020 a new book was published about him: I Want to Believe- Posadism, UFO's and Apocalypse Communism by AM Gittlitz. There are numerous book reviews and interviews with the author among leftwing commentators, but I am the only journalist from the UFO scene who has covered this topic, see background links below. The presentation was given by Edmund Griffiths, a local author who writes a lot about Russian affairs, especially during the Soviet era. The recording of his leadoff is on his website: http://www.edmundgriffiths.com/posadas.html. It was ironic or maybe serendipitous that this event was arranged in advance for last Thursday evening, the day after the UFO hearing in Mexico, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2023/09/mexico-aliens-livestream.html and the same day as the NASA press conference on UFO's, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2023/09/new-nasa-press-conference.html.
 
I learned a lot from Edmund's talk. It seems that J Posadas changed his position a lot throughout his life. Along with his legendary UFO opinions, he was also famous, and infamous, for other viewpoints. Most controversially, he believed that nuclear war was inevitable and would happen within ten years, sometime in the 1960's. A lot of people were bracing themselves for that as well during the early Cold War; the difference being with Posadas was that he welcomed such an occurrence. That initially sounds outrageous, but he came to this opinion in a very cold materialistic way. He believed that despite the terrible destruction of a nuclear holocaust, it would lay the ground for socialism afterwards; for that reason it was worth it. In this way he holds similar views to my own fictional character Julian Spencer, see: http://hpanwo-bb.blogspot.com/2017/10/roswell-revealed-is-here.html. (I knew nothing about J Posadas or his views when I wrote the Roswell Trilogy. Members of the CCS did not express this same opinion at the meeting.) In the Q and A session after, I made the point that even if it were possible to justify this action in a pure Machiavellian way, it might not work. There is no guarantee that after a nuclear holocaust the society you want would emerge in the post-apocalyptic world. You might end up with something very different and very unwelcome. History is replete with such blunders; albeit on a smaller scale, thank goodness! I gave the example of the Black Death. Historians often speculate about what alternative scenario could have developed after that catastrophe and it includes almost everything imaginable. J Posadas was also interested in dolphins and thought that we could learn to communicate with them. They might even be able to work as midwives. Some people still believe that today, like Dr Denise Herzing, see: https://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2018/04/dolphins-reply-to-stefan-molyneux.html. There is apparently a connection to SETI because one of the people at the meeting mentioned that Posadas knew Peter Lilley, the biologist who studied dolphins and was at the organizing committee of SETI in 1960. Frank Drake, the founding father of SETI once talked about "immortal aliens" and this is a very posadist phrase. Did Dr Drake also have a meeting with Posadas? See here for more details about SETI: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2017/12/ben-emlyn-jones-at-awakecon-2017.html. I was told at the meeting that maybe I had been invited there on false pretences because they didn't discuss aliens very much, but actually I didn't mind. I found the whole event very interesting because I take an interest in general politics as well as all the other things I cover. I'm glad I went along. Many thanks to the Oxford CCS for holding this meeting.
See here for background: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2021/01/ufo-truth-magazine-issue-46.html.
And: https://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2021/01/j-posadas-and-alien-communists.html.
And: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2015/05/oxford-communists-and-aliens.html.