I received a notice the other day that one of my favorite annual festivals is back on the calendar after a couple years off. The Exeter UFO Festival celebrates the Seacoast’s place in the world of the UFO mythos and it falls on the weekend of my birthday. I haven’t missed a show since the second festival. I met Stanton Friedman there while my daughter, now a teenager, then a toddler, squirmed impatiently on my lap. He was a supremely nice dude. I also met Travis Walton there. Travis is the subject of the case that became the basis of the movie, Fire In The Sky. That same weekend, in a nice bit of synchronicity, Last Podcast on the Left did their Travis Walton episode. I explained this to Travis, who then politely asked me what a podcast is.
I’ve written a bit about this in the past, but this part of the country was a real crazy-ass hotbed of UFO activity beginning in the 1950’s and ending somewhere in the 1980’s and it all coincided with the presence here of nuclear weapons on Air Force bombers and Navy missile submarines (aka Boomers), as well as a nuclear power plant that opened in the mid-80’s. In 1965 a kid named Norman Muscarello was hitchhiking through Kingston, on his way to Exeter, when he spotted a huge red craft hovering over a field adjacent to a farm. He freaks out, runs to the cops in Exeter, who then rush out to the spot in a cruiser to find it still hovering there. Meanwhile, drivers up and down a stretch of highway here called Route 101 are being buzzed by a large red craft and police from Hampton to Manchester are getting calls about it. That’s about 35 miles of the state’s southern tier. A couple years before that, seacoast couple, Betty and Barney Hill are traveling home from a trip to Canada when their car was stopped by a strange craft in the area around Lincoln, up in the White Mountains. Their case sparked much of the mythos around UFO abductions and government cover ups. They’re both buried near my house.
So, The Granite State some real UFO bona fides.
The festival in Exeter is great but one of my criticisms of it is that it’s very much an old-school event, where the phenomenon is treated very scientifically. Younger currents in UFOlogy are moving in a direction that is less and less interested in approaching the phenomena as a physical, nuts and bolts occasion and is more in line with the Magonia hypothesis put forth by Jacques Vallee, which treats these visitors more like psychic projections not from another planet but from an entirely different dimension, entirely.
I want to spice things up this year and not only hold my own talk there but also bring up some friends who share my enthusiasm for strangeness and also have some information to share. Personally, I’d like to see about getting on the stage and talking about the UFOnaut Cipher, hopefully with said UFOnaut Cipher’s author, but we’ll have to see about that part. I’ve also buzzed a couple high profile folks that I’ve likely bugged to the point that they just let mentions from me go straight to voicemail, so to speak. I have a great deal of interest and enthusiast from a couple friends who run a publisher for spooky role playing games that see it as a great opportunity to run some tables at the show and playtest one of their upcoming products. It’s all swimming around in my head in that hazy half-baked way that most of my ideas do, exciting me and sparking an infectious enthusiasm that I never seem to follow through on. But I really want to make this happen. There’s a lot of us weirdos up here in New England and it’d be a great opportunity to get us all together in the same place for a day or two, hang out, share a meal and maybe play some spooky board games and role playing games, together.
So I put my mind in motion and threw down some cards to see how I might go about making it happen. I sent a preliminary email to the organizers of the event and found out that the email address they use to communicate with the public is no longer in service, so I contacted them another way and it required that I actually dip a toe into the cursed landscape of Facebook. So help me, God.
I used both The Absu oracle deck and my Book of Azathoth deck, a deck that I haven’t had much luck with in the past, but now that I’m working in a more Lovecraftian current, it seems apropos.
The full Absu couplet is as follows:
The key to the gate, cosmic movement, a monstrous projection
Primal dark wonders, vortices of dust and fire, a queerly-angled place
The 3 cards are The Hermit, Princess of Swords, The Hierophant and the way that I typically read these 3-card pulls for people is
Card 1 represents the querent
Card 2 represents the problem
Card 3 represents a jumping-off point
The Tarot
As The Hermit I’m very much on my own here. I have only my own light to guide me and often times, when it comes to setting cool things in motion, I often have to do it myself. I’m driven by a need for novelty. I hate being bored and when you have to rely on people to make interesting things happen, you’re at the mercy of whatever it is that they consider interesting. I may not agree. So I have this light, which might rep my idea. A light can also draw people to it, though. I am both guiding myself along on this mission with only my own experience to guide me, which brings me to the problem. I’m also the Princess of Swords. I have this idea but not much experience in making this kind of thing happen. She’s easily excitable and very enthusiastic but also has no idea how to wield this idea or put it to productive use. Inexperience and not really having any connections or allies in my local weirdo scene has me at a disadvantage and all turned around. I don’t exactly know who to get in touch with or who might take me, a total newcomer to the scene, more seriously. In my many attempts to crack the larger paranormal scene out there, I often find myself spinning my wheels in the face of gatekeepers who are suspicious of new faces. The solution, in this case, is to not try and be the Hierophant but be the two dudes before the Hierophant. If I go into this acting like I’m about to shake the whole thing up and take over, they’re going to tell me to beat it. But if I come before them and play by the rules, recognize their authority and plead my case in a productive way, they’ll likely be vastly more receptive to my ideas and proposals.
The Absu Oracle
Now, let’s address the Absu cards. The key to the gate couldn’t be any more on the nose. There are gatekeepers here and I need to figure out how to open that gate and enter the kingdom. I need to expect things to move slowly as cosmic movement isn’t exactly known for being speedy. When we talk about change on a cosmic scale, we’re often talking about deep time. So I’m going to have to be patient. The organizers, a local Kiwanis Club chapter, probably have a lot going on and Frater Pera’s self-indulgent plan to get some new angles into the UFO Festival will likely not take top priority. The monstrous projection might even take the shape of folks on the inside not exactly understanding the value of my proposition. Gaming? We already have fun stuff. There’s a pet costume contest and the crash site!
Right. But those are for little kids. There’s a whole middle tier of weirdo who comes without child, not to mention the fact that non-RPG gaming, like tabletop board gaming also appeals to younger players. I can facilitate this and have friends who would enthusiastically back me up on it and help.
Primal dark wonders, a queerly-angled place and vortices of dust and fire (the latter being a reference to djinn), likely indicates the infancy of my plan. I’m talking to people who need details. If I’m coming to them, I don’t want to add to their pile by trying to hitch some half-baked scheme to what is likely already a fairly convoluted process to work out. If I’m going to insist on putting myself in their way, I need to have something that is solid and can be readily bolted on to the festival with a minimum of planning for them to do. The less that they have to do, the more easy it is to say yes.
How to go about that, though?
Let’s do some math. The three cards in the Absu oracle number 3, 43, and 47.
3 + 43 + 47 = 93
Let’s simplify that a bit, shall we?
3 + (4 + 3 = 7) + (4 + 7 = 11) = 21 = 2 + 1 = 3
3, huh? Let’s simplify 93.
9 + 3 = 12 = 1 + 2 = 3
The 3-card in the deck is The key to the gate, primal dark wonders. The key lies in the number 3. Also, if you look real close at that Hierophant, the two dudes on the card before Hastur are separated by crossed keys, which clued me into which role I play in the card’s symbolism there. The answer to my question lies in the power of the number 3. Friend of the Codex, Marco Visconti then chimed in.
Binah, the lens through which the hazy concept in Chokmah becomes ordered. She imposes her rules on it, defines and names all the parts. She takes Chokmah’s wild infinity and enthusiasm and transforms it into something finite in spacetime.
The answer is to get all my ducks in a row before I go to the festival’s organizers. If I need guests to support me, get them on board first. Find out what they need to make this happen for them. Decide what it is, in no uncertain terms, that I plan to present. Get the gaming guys fully on board and briefed and find out what they need and would like to bring to the show. Then work it out with the festival. If I’m fully prepared, the less it seems like the festival has to plan and organize, the more likely they’ll be to roll me into the proceedings.
Lastly, the Book of Azathoth is a deck by an artist named Nemo. The Hierophant has their name at the bottom of the card, just below the keys. For shits and grins I ran Nemo through the Absu cipher.
Nemo = 13 = Wisdom.
Binah means wisdom in Hebrew.