Some Reflections about My 'Unsuccessful' Application to Mr. Bigelow's Unusual Essay Contest

 

The Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies "Best Evidence for Afterlife" essay competition was announced in January and publicized by news media.  Award money of $500,000, $300,000 and $150,000 will be paid to authors of essays selected by a group of judges.  A statement at the website of Robert Bigelow's organization explains: "The goal of the essay contest is to award contestants for writing papers that summarize the best evidence available for the survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death."

I decided to submit an application on the basis of there being the potential to contribute prize money to philanthropic organizations.  My application was submitted on Feb. 19 with a confirmation Email statement received from the "BICS Staff" on Feb. 23.  Considering what topic would be suitable for an essay, one idea was identifying some of the books and videos that offer evidence and explaining what is impressive about each of them — hundreds of articles at this blog do this and all of these articles are readily accessible to readers on a noncommercial basis.

Applicants were asked to provide a "Background and Qualification Statement" responding to the sentence My background and qualifications to submit an essay to the BICS competition are:

Here is the description that I wrote:

An online INDEX page about my metaphysical writing is available at PARANORMALENCYCLOPEDIA.ORG that includes photos of 'afterlife' evidence. As a teenager during the 1970s after experiencing a few instances of apparent 'psychic phenomena,' I began reading books about survival of human consciousness after death. I still have my original paperback edition of THE EDGE OF THE UNKNOWN. After receiving a B.A. degree from USC (Cinema major), I worked in the entertainment industry. I was a talent agent before working as a movie publicity staff writer at Paramount Pictures. I became a metaphysical author with the nonfiction case study book TESTAMENT (1997) with a documentary-style verbatim interview transcript format.

The first 240+ pages of TESTAMENT center on a family in Oklahoma experiencing transcendental communication during what had been called "America's Talking Poltergeist" case in an issue of FORTEAN TIMES magazine. Beyond the most prominent manifesting entity having been the enigmatic 'Michael,' the described sequence of invisible visitors includes murdered people and apparent extraterrestrials. In 2009 I began blogging with the "Metaphysical Articles: Interesting Articles, Links and Other Media" blog. Among the 500+ articles published to-date are "Case Profile: Jane Roberts - The 'Channel' for 'Seth,'" "Andrew Jackson Davis - Psychic and Channeler," "Life and the Afterlife Explained from the Other Side" and "Rosemary Brown and the Media."

A note at the Bigelow Institute homepage states: "If you have NOT heard from us by March 5, 2021, your application has been unsuccessful."

My response to this is that there is something preposterous about having judges for an essay contest who won't even be able to consider all of the submissions.  Regarding equitability, carelessness at the initial stage of such a competition will have an impact on the outcome.  Perhaps the unnamed initial stage judge/s were just seeking impressive university credentials or something of that sort.  Maybe he, she or they didn't even bother to take a look at my noted Web page.  After learning of my apparent 'unsuccessful' application to the essay contest, I decided to add an "Afterlife" notation to my online subjects index at the website mentioned in my submitted profile description https://paranormalencyclopedia.org.

 

I noticed that one of the journalists who interviewed Mr. Bigelow is Ralph Blumenthal of The New York Times.  He wrote the following paragraphs in a Jan. 21 profile article mentioning the "nearly $1 million in prizes."

. . . profits have enabled him, he says, to sink more than $350 million into Bigelow Aerospace, "my own real black hole," as he put it in recent phone interviews.

They have also enabled Mr. Bigelow to indulge a celebrated, if sometimes derided, interest in what he called "anomalous events" including his 20-year ownership of a spooky Utah ranch overrun by flying orbs and other creepy phenomena.

The money enabled him, however, to establish the Bigelow Foundation in 1992, collaborating with Bob Lazar, who claimed to have worked on reverse-engineering recovered extraterrestrial craft at the covert Nevada base known as Area 51.  Mr. Bigelow also supported Dr. John E. Mack, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard who wrote two popular books on his experiences counseling people with credible alien abduction accounts, and Dr. Mack's frequent collaborator Budd Hopkins, an artist turned abduction investigator who wrote his own popular books.

In 1995, Mr. Bigelow founded the National Institute of Discovery Science to study paranormal phenomena, paying $200,000 the following year for the 480-acre Skinwalker Ranch, nicknamed for the shape-shifting witches of Navajo legend and vacated by its frightened owners, Terry and Gwen Sherman.

News accounts by the Las Vegas reporter George Knapp and others reported the couple had been terrorized by giant wolves unscathed by gunshots, glowing balls that vaporized their dogs and invisible forces that mutilated cattle, leaving them bloodlessly eviscerated.

Mr. Bigelow's investigative team, headed by Colm Kelleher, the institute’s scientific administrator and biochemist, documented their own paranormal events, according to a 2005 book, "Hunt for the Skinwalker," by Dr. Kelleher and Mr. Knapp.

He sold the ranch in 2016 for about $500,000 to another billionaire realty tycoon, Brandon Fugal, who has continued his own private on-site research.

Given what he called an overwhelming "preponderance of evidence," from more than 235 people he had interviewed about their close encounter experiences, he said, "it gets silly to be dragging the dead cat up and down the alley and pretending nothing's wrong."

In 2017 Lara Logan asked him on "60 Minutes": "Do you believe in aliens?" He responded, "I'm absolutely convinced. That's all there is to it."

Unlike consciousness, what he broadly called "E.T." has provided physical evidence to study, Mr. Bigelow said. "Maybe you've been handed something that's anomalous and it doesn't analyze" as anything we can make, he said.

But when asked to confirm that he possessed or knew of demonstrably off-earth material, he said: "I don't go there. There's things I don't mind talking about and things I do mind talking about."

He was happy, however, to discuss his new afterlife contest, details of which he was set to fill in starting late Sunday on the national nighttime paranormal radio show "Coast to Coast." Its frequent weekend host is Mr. Bigelow's longtime friend George Knapp of KLAS TV Las Vegas.

Mr. Bigelow said that of two "Holy Grail" questions — whether bodily death marked the end of existence and whether we are alone in the cosmos — he put survival of consciousness first, with a special moral aspect. "It may matter what you do while you're here," he said. "It could make a difference on the other side."

This sounds religious, but Mr. Bigelow said he subscribed to no church or denomination, rather, a "God force."

The two mysteries, moreover, may be somehow entwined, Mr. Bigelow speculated. "If we see a shadow going through one wall and through another, we don't know for sure if it was a discarnate human spirit or E.T.," he said.

One personal footnote. Don't ask me what happened on Jan. 4 at 5:45 a.m. as I lay sleepless, wrestling with this story. A tremendous bang jolted me and my wife and the dog upright. We found the glass door to our 12th-floor terrace completely spiderwebbed with cracks as if struck with tremendous force, but there was no sign of any projectile. Invisible moisture between the double panes? Or something else? There are things I don't mind talking about and things I do mind talking about.

Considering the last paragraph, my perspective after many phenomenal experiences and researching the annals of anomalous phenomena to learn what parallels could be found, there is nothing that I wouldn't feel comfortable talking about. The "God Force" knows everything there is to know about each one of us.  Longtime readers of this blog know that the expression 'God Force' is one that I myself have used and these words are found in transcripts of transcendental communication, such as orations of 'channeled entities.' 

 

Reporter Ralph Blumenthal has written a book about John Mack.  Being published this week, the book mentions so-called 'contactee' cases as being "all strikingly short of convincing evidence, leaving the contactees as often-derided fringe players in a long and perplexing mystery."  This may be indicative of what Mack didn't know about the subject of 'contactees.'  The way this sentence is phrased in Ralph's book reminds me about how personal discernment is involved in all scientific study and also in all journalism.  Something stated before is that — I've long been aware that there's an obvious impasse for UFOlogists who don't know about or ignore the evidence of several of the best documented flying saucer/UFO 'contactee' cases . . . the 'contactee' accounts usually go unmentioned in UFOlogy journalism.  For example - the Truman Bethurum case left him with two objects to share with the world as physical proof of his paranormal experiences.

Considering some of the aspects of Ralph's latest newspaper article, below is shown 'paranormal' photos shown at the Testament website photos and captions page.

'the aliens' photo detail

'the aliens' from Mc Wethy family album

I amplified the brightness for this portion of the photo shown below.

This is the photo mentioned [in Oklahoma Bell/Mc Wethy family interviews] as showing a pair of eyes or 'red eyes' in the dark background of a room.  The eyes and faint visage of a 'mysterious visitor' are noticeable; however, there is no red coloration of the eyes.

Update: Another blog article mentioning Robert Bigelow during the award winners announcement stage of the essay competition is "These Dispensations Remain Unknown to Most People".