Orange Leather
Weird title, right?
So, this past July we here at GHPR started a new project. We’d talked about it since late January and been toying around with the idea for a few months prior to that, even, but it didn’t start until the summer.
Currently, all active members work at the DeeP (a comic shop where we all met in Huntsville, Alabama). What started as plans to film investigations for our own benefit (simply so we could revisit old encounters and have a little bit of proof to back up our stories) quickly morphed into something entirely different.
We were going to film a show.
This show was going to have a zero dollar budget, no attached streaming rights (it would be posted directly to my own personal youtube account), and it would be as much about us as it was about our adventures. I pitched the idea as being more akin to a reality show about people who work at a comic shop and just happen to go on ghost hunts when I was talking to the other members about it. There would be no dramatic musical stings, no weird thoughtful moments, and nothing too serious.
Our first day of filming was set to be July 7th somewhere near Hulaco, Alabama.
That night changed everything.
I don’t want to come off too dramatic in how I’m presenting this.
The show isn’t finished yet (I think we’re taking a break right now due to a) low temperatures making it hard to film overnight and b) a general lack of free time but we are about halfway through our schedule and it won’t take long to finish once we resume). We still have no budget. There are no attached producers, distribution companies, or anything fancy like that. Although, to be honest, I’m not saying I won’t shop it around if all goes well (my contact info’s on the site — call me netflix!).
The show itself (and our approach to all this) has been irrevocably changed, though. It’s all because of what we experienced that night which, although I want you to see the whole story in the show, I’m not against sharing some of that with you guys.
Basically, we wanted to see if we could get abducted by aliens.
I’d read in a book on the subject about how a contactee in the sixties was told that, whenever he wanted to reach out and speak with his visitors from the planet Lanulos, all he had to do was visualize orange leather. He couldn’t just picture it, though. He had to make it so real he could feel it and smell it. According to the contactee (and some of his friends who he introduced to the concept) it worked. They would encounted UFOs (and sometimes their occupants) every night that they went out and did this.
Now, I’m not saying that I believe that leather has some weird connection to extraterrestrials and that they must be drawn to this mental image, just that, if there is some mental or psychical aspect to all this, that perhaps truly focused thought and intention may affect our attempts. This orange leather technique, I think, is no different than using a spoken mantra to meditate.
We practiced this meditation for a few weeks prior to the actual day.
The morning of, while I was preparing to pick everyone up, I stopped and addressed the open sky. “Come speak with us, let us see something,” I pleaded.
For all intents and purposes, it succeeded.
No, as far as we can remember, we were not abducted. We did, however, see an orange orb that seemed to be hovering an approximate twenty to thirty feet off the ground as it drifted over a soybean field before making a sudden, drastic maneuver and flying off into the distance. And we made contact with something on our spirit box that had a very strange manner of speaking and claimed that that orb was either the physical manifestation of what we were speaking to or else that it occupied the orb (it wasn’t very clear and wouldn’t elaborate much).
I know it sounds crazy, but it really happened to us. We have most of the experience on horribly shaky, out of focus, way too dark film!
It changed our entire approach to the paranormal, changed the focus of the show (and it’s name — it went from “Into the DeeP” to “Signal and Noise”), and made us rethink what we had planned.
A few weeks following this, I was at a relative’s house when she and I decided to recreate the experiment that night.
We were out stargazing, talking, and wondering if anything would happen when, from the treeline, a massive white light suddenly illuminated the immediate area. It was somewhat like a giant flash bulb going off, especially in how it seemed to linger for a moment.
The following morning I awoke to a strange email in my private account, speaking of “brother fighting men”, the “Tupper Lake Watershed”, and “great sheets of placid water”.
It became apparent that, to put it scientifically, something was up.
I became mildly obsessed with the email, running it through occult cyphers, certain that there was some hidden meaning that I was missing. A series of synchronicities followed that left me certain I had truly entered Chapel Perilous (as Robert Anton Wilson would put it).
A conversation with a bigger, more publicly known paranormal group left me with acceptable answers as to the source of the email, but I still find the whole thing strange. For a few weeks I wondered if I’d had some kind of mental break, going as far back as the manifestation of the orb. But no, I wasn’t alone. The other members were there with me. They’d seen it, too. We had most of the night on film. It had all really happened.
It’s been on my mind every since. I don’t really know how to approach it or what to make of it all just yet, but I’ve wanted to share this with you all for a while. It’ll be explored in more depth in the first and last episodes of the series, but I don’t want to leave you guys hanging since it may be a moment before we have anything new to share.
A vision of orange leather, despite its strangeness, had seemingly shifted our entire understanding of reality. Again, I don’t think it was the leather. All of this makes me think that, and this is an opinion I share frequently here and in person, our experience of reality has a lot more to do with what we expect to encounter or what we’re open to encounter than we realize. I don’t know that we found the mental shortcut to dial up extraterrestrials or something like that, but we at least opened ourselves up to this part of reality that not many people seem to get to experience.
Now, the show and our exploration of this field is all about seeing what we can cause to happen. Seeing if we can take the basis behind the orange leather experiment and apply it in other ways to get similar results.
I hope I don’t sound crazy.
Try the experiment for yourself and let me know what happens!
Keep a couple things in mind:
1) Visualize it while you’re meditating (if you can)
2) Make the leather strip as real as you can. Turn it over in your hands. Smell it. Feel it how it warms up as you handle it.
3) Visualize, after this, a UFO or a ball of light or anything else just make sure that you visualize it in a location that you can visit at the time and day that you choose (stipulate that place and time in the visualization, attach it to it if that makes sense)
4) Maintain to yourself that this has already happened. Don’t want it. Don’t hope. It happened. You saw it already. You’re just not caught up to that point in time yet.
5) Try it again if it doesn’t work the first time. Change your focus. Change your location.
In the near future I intend to make a post in which I’ll give out instructions for another attempt at this experiment that we’re going to be undertaking. Help us make our next shot at this as big as we can make it!
Stay weird!
-Scott