Dark Matters Radio

Dark Matters Radio Archives

Welcome back to Dark Matters Radio. Week 26 begins with a foray into an esoteric corner of the paranormal. My guest on Monday July 12 is the writer/researcher Sesh Heri.

Sesh Heri is a very interesting fellow. Starting in 1972 and continuing for several years, Heri performed as Mark Twain in his own one-man show. This led to appearing as Twain in an advertising campaign for Western Airlines, as well as performing the one-man show for the Delta King riverboat theater in his hometown.Fact|date=July 2008

An illustrator, Heri was employed at Marine World briefly as a sketch artist, and illustrated his first novel and the graphic version adapted from it.

Heri is the author of “Wonder of the Worlds” (ISBN 0-9727472-8-1), an adventure featuring the scientific theories of Nikola Tesla and Heri himself, in which Tesla and Mark Twain journey to Mars with Harry Houdini to retrieve a crystal stolen by Martian agents. The novel features Tesla technology and Heri’s own theory of geomorphology, as well as several illustrations by Heri. “Wonder of the Worlds” is the first in a trilogy featuring Harry Houdini and Tesla, among other historical figures.

The Handprint of Atlas Handprint of Atlas
For over twenty-five years Heri researched and developed his theory of geomorphology, in which he states that the axis of the Earth was artificially set in place by a higher intelligence in order that advanced human life be able to develop.

Dark Matters begins at 10:00 PM Pacific Daylight Time on CyberstationUSA, and runs Monday thru Friday. We all hope to “see ya” on the radio.

Tuesday July13 Dark Matters Radio revisits Jim Marrs and Jim’s research into some very “dodgy” theories concerned with remote viewing, the Twin Towers, JFK and many other conspiracies. Jim is always a very fascinating guest and this show is Mucho Fun!

Wednesday July 14 Dr. Barry Taff comes on Dark Matters Radio to discuss his new book Aliens Above Ghosts Below. Dr. Barry Taff is a world wide known Parapsychologist and his most recognized case concerns “The Enity”
which was a case that became a feature film starring Barbra Hershey and Ron Silver.
In “Aliens Above Ghosts Below” discusses many cases he has investigated over his almost 40 years in the paranormal research field. For more on his new book, go to Cosmic Pantheon Press

Thursday July 15 I am joined by long time researcher Greg Bishop, publisher of The Excluded Middle Magazine and host of Radio Misterioso, who along with Friday night co-host Rich Sarradet we will discuss items in a “round table”. There is always a lot going on and we will see how many topics we hit tonight! See ya on the radio …

Oh yes, one last thing … are you a doggie mom or dad? Well, I am and I always worry bout our furry kid. If you are a doggie Mom or Dad make sure you warn your 4 legged child that this can happen to “bad dogs!” See below …..

Friday TBA

Welcome back to another edition of the Dark Matters Blog. It’s been several weeks since I’ve left a post, and after much consideration I decided what I wanted to write about. In the last couple of weeks I have had several topics that I’ve considered then discarded. Since my last post we have a new President, national and international news continues to be the “pits”, and in trying to keep this post a little lighter, I have decided to write about AREA 51! Huh you say? Area 51 Don? Isn’t that about UFOs and aliens and didn’t you say you quit that?

Okay, let me explain. Since the holidays are over Vicki and I have been doing some cleaning out of some of our junk. For a number of years I have had a huge filing cabinet in my office that Vic decided she wanted to use in her office. She and I did some major cleaning out of my office including moving the file drawer to her office, then she started going through the files stored there. Follow me so far? She would pull out files, glance at them and then shove them back in my office. (All these files came from our days running UFO Magazine.) Anyway, in those files, many dealt with the Area 51 story.

Now back when we ran UFO Magazine, Hollywood would contact us when they were making a film dealing with ET’s or aliens. Sci-Fi pictures seemed to gravitate to our offices and one of the flicks that did was Independence Day, or ID4. Because most of ID4 dealt with Area 51 we were interested since we’ve covered that beat since the story first broke back in 1988.

The journalist that broke the story was George Knapp, a friend of ours and KLAS Chnl. 8 (Las Vegas) investigative reporter. George broke the story on Bob Lazar in a Channel 8 broadcast. Need me to refresh you on Lazar? He was the guy that alleged he was hired by EG&G to “back engineer” alien technology at the government’s super secret base at Area 51. So the story goes, the government has a number of recovered ET ships or saucers stored there in the middle of no-where. (and if you’ve ever been there – it is in the middle of no-where.)

So anyway, “INDEPENDENCE DAY” was in production, we contacted them and we ran several articles on the project. (Here is a cover shot from one issue. It shows the “recovered” alien craft stored out at Area 51.) As excitement began to build someone at 20th Century Fox contacted the politico’s in Nevada (and who in hell knows?) somebody came up with the brilliant idea to rename Highway 375 to the “ET Highway.” The ceremony would take place in Rachel, Nevada and among other dignitaries would be Nevada Governor Bob Miller.

Vicki and I were invited to speak along with George Knapp and the Director of the Mutual UFO Network. I promo-ed the gig heavily on my radio show UFOs Tonite!, and entire bus loads of folks went out there for the festivities.

Like any endeavor created by man, there were the “kill-joys” with this bunch. One guy we knew, Glenn Campbell, had been very involved in the whole Area 51 thing, and for awhile he published a paper called The Groom Lake Desert Rat, all about what was going on with Area 51 (the secret base) while also running a newsgroup called UFO Mind. For some unknown reason Campbell took umbrage at the State of Nevada and 20^th Century Fox renaming Highway 375 to ET Highway. He went on a rampage and his “victory” was managing to detour one bus full of tourista’s down some damn side road instead of to the site where all the festivities were taking place!

Lots of celebrities’ showed up. Dean Devlin, Brent Spiner, Robert Loggia, and Jeff Goldblum were the ones to make it. Will Smith and Randy Quaid didn’t make it, nor did Roland Emerich. Gov. Bob Miller addressed the crowd, then Vicki and I did, George Knapp talked and later the MUFON guy was clean up batter. The movie ended up making better than three quarters of a billion dollars, we got a free trip to the desert. (Oh, did I mention that originally Vic and I were on the bus with the “Stars” but then we were moved to a bus with the rest of the peons. I guess all that high-powered star power didn’t want to rub elbows with us working folk!)

The upshot is that I can “brag” that Vicki and I helped dedicate the ET Highway, got a free ride to that damn hot and windy desert, and we still had to buy tickets to the flick itself! But hey! I personally liked the movie … Go Figure.

Alright, it’s time for a Re-Cap.

So, I bought my first computer all the way back in 1987. It was a Tandy Corp. (Radio Shack) 1000 EX.

Now, comparing that to computer systems today is like comparing  a stone tipped spear to a M-16 rifle. In other words, there is no comparison.

But! (And this is a big But) I ended up loving that damn thing. It was FUN dinking around on it. I first started writing on that 1000 EX, and I first GAMED on it with Starflight. Starflight, my first ever computer game that for several months “TOOK ME OVER!”

Starflight – The Game

Now in our last session I relayed to you how I bought that game for $50 at the Radio Shack computer store, brought it home and tore open the package and checked it out. I called my buddy Chuck and filled him in on it, he showed up for a couple of hours then left to go home, he came back with a BOX of wine and he and I took off to explore the whole DAMNED GALAXY! We played it all night into the next afternoon and by now we had our ship (by the way, did I mention what we named our starship? The USS Buttercup) completely tricked out! There will be a test. So on to the rest of the story!

Tis The SEASON – Part 2

The phone rang again. Guess who? Now I have not said much about my pal yet. Chuck and I were tight. We had worked together, both shared the Army and Viet Nam in our background. He, by the way, was a total straight shooter. He was a black and white kind of guy. No grey in his background. He always deferred to his wife…except this time. If he made up his mind about something, nothing, and I mean nothing would change it. He took the phone, said “Yeah?” listened for a minute and hung up. We headed back to space.

Now during our voyages we occasionally found artifacts. Little gadgets, little widgets that we didn’t have a clue about until we could get back to Starport and have it analyzed. So, somewhere along the trail we ran into a race of aliens called the Spemin. These guys were mouthy and obnoxious, but put a laser beam into their crew compartment and they would tell you everything they knew. We got some good information from them and then salvaged their stuff after we smoked them. Now it is about 5:30 PM on Saturday. We might have broke for lunch, went out and got a burger but I don’t really remember much. When we got back we knew what part of the galaxy we were heading to next. Upspin and outward.

We had heard about a mysterious artifact called The Black Egg and knew that in order to solve this entire puzzle, the Egg fitted into it somehow. We had also heard rumblings about another race that were called the Uhlek, some very-very bad dudes. No one really wanted to discuss these characters, other races were terrified of them. And … there was one place we were warned to avoid at all costs, the Uhlek Brain World. Now that sounded ominous enough that Chuck and I could not wait to find this place. After all, we had Class 5 engines, enough to outrun anything in space. We had Class 5 screens, Class 5 lasers and missiles, the works. My crew had as much training as could be purchased by anyone. We thought we were ready.

The testosterone was flowing, Chuck and I were now on our fifth or sixth pot of coffee, bathroom breaks were becoming more frequent, my vision was blurry and in the back of my head were the earliest stages of a monumental caffeine meltdown.  I looked over at Chuck and saw his eyes. His irises looked like two piss-holes in the snow. By then I felt as bad as he looked. But there was something in the air and we both felt it. We had been taking turns piloting the ship, and I happen to be at the helm at this point. I pointed the ship upspin and outward and we took off.

We had gotten some information about a planet that had the ruins of a City of the Ancients. They said a great treasure might be found there. All somewhat ambiguous, to be sure, but what the hell?  We located a star system and entered it. I (as Captain) ordered a scan of the solar system and it was either the second or third planet from the star that we found the ancient city. We landed and began to explore. Whoa! There was so much endurium that our eyes bulged! (The rarest substance in this universe!) We filled our hold and went out for more. We also found something that the ships computer identified as the Crystal Pearl. Now this was good because we had heard about this thing from contact with several other races. They promised HUGE MU’s if we found this and were willing to sell it. We also got a hint about where the Uhlek Brain World was.

My head was now in full caffeine meltdown. I noticed a definite palsy in my fingers as I attempted to work the controls on the keyboard. Chuck, sitting next to me, would occasionally twitch and jerk a little bit and I instinctively knew the caffeine was in control. The Uhlek’s were supposedly downspin and outward of our then position.  We launched.

Now remember …  back in 1987 no one had ever heard of the BORG before. Matter of fact there were no Borg back then, but later I was to figure out the Uhlek’s must have been the original template for the Borg on Star Trek. They were a hive type race and were all run from the Uhlek Brain World. The main brain called all the shots and they had a very bad attitude toward everything. Think of it like this, they were the Terminator and everything and everybody else was Sarah Connor.

We got downspin and I was checking the starchart. I was looking for a likely system to enter when our proximity alarm went off. I had raised ships screens and we started scanning. Suddenly we dropped out of hyper-drive (when you encountered a ship in deep space this was automatic) and there was just one ship out there. I ordered the science station to scan the ship and the Comm Officer to hail it. Before either order was carried out……BOOM! This guy nailed us good  with a weapon we had NEVER encountered before! We had found the Uhlek! His weapon cut through our screens like they weren’t even up. I think I screamed RED ALERT! (And I mean I REALLY DID SCREAM)  when he hit us again. My engineer’s console lit up like a Christmas Tree …. and when I looked down, the engines were knocked off line, there were hull breaches, weapons were down, we were dead in space!  There was a slight pause …. then he fired at  us one last time. The whole thing BLEW with a very sickening  yellow screen blank. The monitor went yellow, then black!  One other thing. Remember that I was a newbie computer user. That means that we had not been (as the manual suggested) saving the game periodically. We really were dead in space.

Chuck looked at me and stood up. “Uh, I’m gonna go home” he dead panned. He grabbed his cigarettes and headed out the door. I sat there a moment still rather stunned. My head was pounding with massive caffeine abuse while I removed my working disks from the drive. I powered down the computer and decided bed wasn’t a bad idea. “Uhlek bastards” I mumbled as I took four aspirin. What is really funny in hindsight is that I felt about the Uhlek then the way I felt about Al Qaeda on September 11th.  “I will be back!” I vowed as I stumbled into bed. Before I totally collapsed I was thinking “If we had only been faster on the scans and lasers..” but the headache had taken over. I lay there exhausted and finally drifted off.

Later I realized that for two days in 1987, while enjoying the cheap wine, massive overdoses of caffeine, no sleep and little food, the Interstel Company and its universe with assorted aliens, widgets and MU’s became as real to me as Bill Gates, Microsoft and Windows XP are real to you. I experienced computer psychosis at its finest.

Over the next several months Chuck and I worked on the game weekly before we finally figured it all out. (I also bought a hint book to the tune of about $20, which was the turning point, that and saving the sessions!) But after that weekend Chuck’s wife was never very nice to me again. I saw it in her eyes when she glared at me. I did say that the life of an Interstel Starship Captain had its drawbacks.

Okay, lets review the situation. Just a very short time until the big day. Which day? Why Christmas of course. Seeing as how my last post was rather dour, I thought it was time to Lighten Up a bit.

The fact of the matter is, Christmas has always been a great time of year for me. I love the Holly, love the Lights, love the Tree, Decorations and all the other stuff that goes with the Season! Of course buying Christmas gifts, receiving Christmas gifts, geeze the little boy comes out in me. Which means …I’ve been thinking. I have always been a sucker for electronic gizmos, which is how I bought my first computer way back in 1987. When I bought it from Radio Shack, (back in the day they had a big computer thing going on) I actually did not have a clue what I could do with it. The system was a Tandy 1000 EX, which meant it was composed of a keyboard with internal 360 K drive (just one) and a stand for the monitor and when the monitor was turned on you could count the pixels on the screen.

BUT I GREW TO LOVE THAT COMPUTER!

I also bought a couple of external disk drives (another 360 K and a 720 K drive) a 300 baud modem, a dot matrix printer, more memory until it had 640 K’s worth (and did you know that back then Bill Gates SAID NO ONE NEEDED MORE THAN 640 K ?) and all the assorted cables extra blank floppies, etc.

Yep, I was in Hog Heaven.

Then I did something that reverberates to this day. I bought Starflight .

It was a game. It hooked me. Let me tell you about it.

I was a rookie. In Army speak I was a FNG, a cherry and this

damn game almost took me over. For just a while it grabbed me

worse than crack gets an addict and I didn’t know any better.

Over the years I have bought a number of different computer

games. Actually I am not big gamer, and the game has to grab me

in order to keep my attention. Most of my computer time is

involved with my writing, my research and surfing the web. My

point is that today I don’t game a lot.

Back in early “87″ there wasn’t a lot to keep us science fiction

fans happy. I like to explore the concepts that good science fiction

presents. But in “87″ the only thing Sci Fi happening was the

occasional Star Trek flick coming out. Even the next Star Trek

series, The Next Generation, had not debuted yet.

I had gone over to the Radio Shack Computer Center and was

wandering around their software section. I had become good

buddies with the staff, and when I wandered into the store they

usually cleared a path for me. They knew they had a sale. I was still

learning computer-ese and carefully scanned the software on

display. I was in the game section and noticed a pretty cool looking

package. It said STARFLIGHT and it had an awesome looking

ship on the cover. The package was dark, and behind the ship was

a starfield and several planets lurking in the background. One of the

salesmen, a younger guy drifted over. “Hey, this looks kind of

cool” I began. “Oh definitely.” he said. “I have it at home and it’s a

keeper.” “Alright, so what is the deal?” I was thinking of Kirk and

Spock.

“Well, this is a mystery” he began. “It starts out at a starport where you are assigned your ship.” Oh this was almost too much! My very own Enterprise with phasers, photon torpedoes and other goodies! Well not quite… Whoever designed this game had studied (very carefully) all the important tenets of capitalism and entrepreneurship and wanted to make sure that only with hard work AND a level of failure built in, would one finally get that bad ass starship. You start with a ship that barely gets out of space dock, and had they had a kid with a slingshot, he could have knocked you out of the sky.

The idea is to go boldly where only a few (that each paid their $50) have gone before and earn lots of MU’s (that’s STARFLIGHT lingo for bucks or the long green stuff …. Monetary Units) and then you can outfit your ship with all the neat stuff. Stuff like armor for the ship, lasers NOT phasers, screens (if this were Trek that would be shields) and engines that didn’t come out of a 64 Corvair. Unfortunately the first one in my ship probably did. You see, everything came in classes, class 1 engine up to a class 5. Same with the ships screens, lasers, etc. Oh yes, one more thing. The crew (which you can pick from the recruitment center, and they are not necessarily all human) have to be trained. All this of course takes money and they don’t give you much. I guess they wanted to see just what we starship captains were really made of.

I plopped down my $50 and took it home.

The game came on two 360 K disks. They squeezed a lot on a 360 K disk back then. First order of business, make two working copies of the disks, which I did. I knew this would work on my system, it said right on the cover. I had no hard drive, so during game play you are called upon to swap disks at times. Luckily it never happened when something really good was going on.

I called my best buddy Chuck to inform him of this new development. He promised to come over.

So, here I am up to my ears in the instructions. I want to make sure I experience every second of what this thing has to offer. And there was a lot of stuff in there. A star chart, a security access code wheel (now this was interesting, what in hell do you need something like that for?) the manual, and Aquick start sheet plus the two disks. First order of business is make the working copies. For you more recent computer users, there was a time when one had to do all this prior to using a program. You had the master disks then the worker disks. Sounds kind of like a commercial for communism doesn’t it?

Anyway I got that done. I secured my master disks in a safe place just like the manual said. Now I am ready to explore the universe. Well almost…. I fired the game up and first had to tell it all about my computer. Yes I have a CGA monitor, yes I will be switching floppies, yes it is a Tandy 1000 computer. Okay, I think it is ready.

Bingo, I am on a space platform that vaguely resembled something I remembered being on my school lunch box when I was a kid. Suddenly my character beamed in! on the platform. With a kind of buzzing noise. From the computers very anemic sound thingy. This is well before sound cards were available. Okay, NOW I was hooked. I looked around at the platform and there were a number of different modules to go to conduct my business. Operations, personnel, crew assignments, a trade depot, ships configuration, and the ALL Important Bank. Now in this universe things were run by an outfit called Interstel. Kind of a cross between the Rockefellers with a touch of Bill Gates thrown in for good measure, and oh say, Blackbeard the Pirate. It seemed like Capitalism that has run amok with more than a hint of piracy. Ok, I can live with this.

The manual recommended I first go to the Op’s Center to be briefed. I wandered in and figured out how it worked and read the briefing. There were a series of personal messages along with some stuff I could use. The company, Interstel, discussed reports from ships that made it back talking about certain areas of space. Areas where ships had disappeared, places with planets that might be suitable for colonization and so on. Later when I really went where no man has gone before, I found this universe HUGE! Much bigger than two 360 K floppy disks would lead you to believe.

The ships propulsion system and the ships power all came from some stuff they called endurium. Kind of a cross between premium octane gasoline and plutonium. The most rare, expensive and powerful substance this universe had to offer!

My buddy Chuck popped through the door.

I brief him on what I got sitting on my computer desk. His eyes light up. I showed him what the starport looked like and now he is suddenly as hooked on this as I am. Oh boy is his wife Charlotte gonna be pissed…..

Anyway what you need here is money .. lots of it. Now there are a number of ways to make money. It seems like this place will pay good MU’s for minerals. Of course in order to do that you need to get out on the frontier with your ship and crew. My problem was I didn’t have a crew yet. Chuck and I wandered over to Personnel.

You need a Captain, that’s me. Well I owned the game and computer so I selected a human guy, named him after me and we’re set. I will be making all the final decisions. We need a Science Officer, (they scan planets, other ships and stuff and can tell you if anything looks good on a planet. Oh yes, they can also recommend a planet for a possible colony if it is suitable. But do not screw this one up, Interstel will fine you big-big MU’s.) We need a good Navigator to pilot the ship. He is the guy that will make sure you don’t get lost in space. And there seems to be a lot of it .. space that is. One other thing he does, in the event of combat he handles all the weapons. We need an Engineer, he will maintain all the systems and make sure they are running at optimum, plus if anything gets damaged he will (hopefully) fix it. Then we need a Comm Officer. He will talk to the different races we may encounter. Last, but certainly not least, need a Doctor to maintain the crew. (Pretty sophisticated for 1987 isn’t it?) So this is what we need. The problem is that we don’t have nearly enough money to trick out these guys.

Oh, one other thing I should mention about the ships crew. We have close to a half dozen different races to choose the crew from. Each one had their pluses and minuses. Humans, the Veloxi (a bug race, good engineers) the Thrynn (reptilians and very good at communications) the Elowan (a race of bipedal photosynthetics or in plain English, plants) and Androids. There were other races to be sure, but these stick in my mind. Another thing. In deep space not all these races get along with each other. If you do have two different races on board that don’t get along “Out There” even though they get along on board, you may run into problems if you encounter one of these races while out there. Trouble like a Class 5 laser blast into your crew compartment once they encounter you. Just another thing to keep in mind.

Now Chuck and I had been working on this for a few hours when the phone rings. Oh yea, it’s his wife. I put him on, he mumbled for minute and hung up. “Uh, I got to go” he informed me. He left out the front door and I figured I wouldn’t be seeing him again for a couple of days. Two hours later he showed back up with a box of the very finest grape adult beverage and we proceeded.

In the solar system, not too far from the starport, was a planet that had been listed as being mineral rich. Like I may or may not have said, one way to earn MU’s was mining. Get out there after getting a crew, training them as much as you could and launching your ship with your 1964 Corvair engine. Get to this planet, land and deploy your rover to explore and mine. Now here is where the navigator comes in handy. Get too far from the ship and if your guy isn’t trained, well Pal, you can get lost. Run out of fuel and you end up walking back. The problem is now you don’t have that rover and you will have got to buy another one. Kind of like working for the company store back in the coal fields of West Virginia.

But if you do land okay, and the planets gravity doesn’t crush you, or you are not killed by planetary wide storms (and this happened to me.) and you mine a bunch of minerals to sell, this is just the beginning.

Back to the starport to sell this stuff and gas up again. Go to the bank and see how much is in the old account. Can I train my guys, buy a new class of engine, upgrade the screens, put on a laser that will do more than warm a TV dinner? I tell you the life of an Interstel Starship Captain is not an easy one.

By now it is about 4:00 AM on Saturday morning. Chuck and I emptied the box of wine some time before and I had put on the coffee. We discovered what the mystery was. We didn’t know what caused it but we knew what it was. It seemed that this entire section of space had become unstable. Stars were going nova. In other words they were blowing up! And no, I do not recommend you or your ship be in the solar system when it happened.

Besides mining we discovered another way of making a lot of MU’s. This, by the way, only worked if you had good ship screens and powerful lasers. If one had an unpleasant encounter with an alien race that resulted in a weapons discharge, and of course, providing that you smoked them, you could salvage their fuel and materials. Instant spending cash. Now we could really train our guys and upgrade everything! (And some of these arrogant alien scum had it coming. We had been taking it in the ear from some of these green scum for too long now. Groveling every time we ran into some of these guys. Just because they had more powerful ships and weapons. Things were changing!)

I looked at my watch. It was close to noon. Chuck and I had been on my computer since the afternoon before. A box of wine, 3 pots of coffee, no sleep, hot smoking lasers, Baby! we was wired.

Stay tuned for the EXCITING CONCLUSION, Part 2, TO THIS EXCITING STORY ! Oh yeah, and a very HEARTY MERRY CHRISTMAS to You and Yours !