In Edinburgh, Scotland, between the years of 1996 and the millennium, there operated a small think tank based at a social club in Edinburgh.
Our group was called the Transformation Studies Group.
Our emblem was the Butterfly - after the 'Butterfly effect' so called because in natural chaos tiny changes can have huge consequences.
It was formed to study the world and the things in it, which contributed to the great changes of mind, body, spirit and global social fabric that we were all witnesses to.
It was conducted in a spiritual and ecumenical manner, attracting; scientists, new age practitioners, greens, journalists, scholars, government representatives, entrepreneurs and artists.
We had the almost undivided attention and patronage of one of Scotland's greatest scholars in Ethnology and Secret Societies in Robert Brydon who it did seem was the real life template for the film by Steven Spielberg called 'Raiders of the Lost Ark'.
Authors publishing on the history of Rosslyn or indeed Scottish history in general will seek his learned input. As a Templar archivist and historian he would liase with the International Star temple - Stella Templum and also with other organisations.
Bob Brydon - a one time buyer for the Dalhai llama in Tibet and South African explorer was himself educated by professor Keggie of the Home Office, and was once part of an archaeological dig in the Western isles of Scotland looking for a small red-haired dwarf-like people who stayed in stone igloos.
His most recent exploits include the dive for the Charles 1st sunken treasure ship off Burntisland in the river Forth estuary near Edinburgh.
We were very privileged to have schooling from this great man.
We had managed to pioneer a study of Magical Realism [c.f. Umberto Eco] in Scotland, and perform one or two important experiments.
Magical Realism to us was the bizarre fabrications that were grafted onto real issues and ideas. Magical Realism was rational thought processes being used to verify and justify irrationalism and magic.
For example the idea that matter and materials and atoms are based on a paradox in quantum science leaves the door open for all sorts of other magical theories and sandcastle ideologies to be assembled on those foundations of nothing.
Quantum leaps into nowhere feature in the alleged mechanics of strange 'tachyon capsules' that could allegedly bend time and space beyond Einstein's world of physics and afford protection from extra terrestrial monsters and were available exclusively on the internet for fifty dollars. Their resemblance to strip light starter motors being unintentional.
The realities of logical thinking were being hijacked by a world putting more value on how it felt.
Certainly 'tachyon capsules' made the guy that paid for them feel good and more protected. That, one assumes, having more to do with the psychology of the placebo effect rather than some black ops patent that inexplicably got past the American patents vetting process that had so successfully buried Tesla's real inventions.
However, it seemed to us that these 'magically real' ideas and issues were becoming more and more prevalent.
One of our areas of interest was the UFO phenomenon that was happening in Scotland.
At that time Bonnybridge in West Lothian had become the busiest UFO hotspot on the planet. Not because as was suggested by the Discovery Channel, that unemployed people trying to create a funfair and theme park were reporting aircraft landing at Edinburgh Airport, but, because people were genuinely having experiences.
There were reports of all sorts of UFO hunts as folks would take to their vehicles to pursue ET down the nearest motorway.
There were even photographs of a massive microorganism in the sky over Bonnybridge which we identified as a bacteria eating Paramoecium, a single celled freshwater aquatic organism.
This thing was huge but also in the papers too.
Was it a hologram or was it the kind of thing suggested by Charles Fort, to explain the universe of weird objects that could fall from the sky, i.e. that we were all on the bottom of a very big pond.
Many of us started taking a look at Bonnybridge, as it seemed to be an area under strange social stress. Perhaps the weird things that were happening were portents of some great event yet to happen - perhaps even a catastrophe. In the USA the appearance of the Mothman was a prelude to a major disaster. Sightings went on the increase until the bridge went down into the river.
Bonnybridge was in an area permeated by heavy industry and also had a local chemical works, which seemed to be polluting and messy.
Might it be that all the UFO's and abductions were medical checks on interstellar citizens living in downtown Scotland.
In this Falkirk UFO triangle where all the abductions and sightings were taking place was Bonnybridge.
I got a call from John W one evening complaining that a very special video filmed by a mrs B was being taken out of the country without anyone getting a decent look at it.
John W said that this video, once enhanced, would provide incontrovertible evidence that could potentially fuel a public enquiry.
It turns out that every Thursday Mrs B had noticed a black triangle hovering over her neighbour's house. It was so regular that one Thursday she had waited with a camera and had filmed it.
Dr Stephen Greer, ET specialist, had apparently flown in on a private jet to Edinburgh Airport and had managed to exit with the only copy - which we subsequently got him to return.
Over a decade later and still no public enquiry, though UFO sightings in Bonnybridge seemed to tail off after the chemical factory closed.
It turns out that the reason John W was into this stuff was because of his own personal experiences.
He had been incessantly bothered day and night by these beings. Sometimes he would find himself naked, outside and locked out.
Sometimes whilst in the bath his imagination would be dragged into some dark green matrix, down dark cybernetic corridors.
Worse still they were interceding in his personal and family life.
In the true nature of being Scottish though is that character that sometimes shines through when the chips are down.
John was in his bed one evening sleeping next to his wife when suddenly he awoke and could see a Grey alien standing across the room. He then tried to awaken his wife but to no avail.
He watched it slowly come across the room, getting ready to give it that most traditional of Scottish interstellar greetings.
The following is supplied in Scottish Lowlands language with English translations.
'etz goat ma airum' [the enterprising extra terrestrial gentleman appears to have taken hold of my arm]
'an a punched it, an it went flee'in acroas the room an hit the wa.. it slid doon tae the floor an lay there.. then suddenly it goat back up an shook itsell an came stompin acroas the room an pit its face in mine.'
[I punched it and it flew across the room, hitting the wall and it slid down, lying still. Then the cheeky chappie suddenly got back up, shook itself and quickly came back over across the room and put its face in mine.]
John W, a total hero, is one of the very few living Scotsmen or indeed men, to have smacked one of these jokers in the kisser.
Before taking a back seat in Scotland, John had researched Blackridge in West Lothian, which was in the Falkirk triangle area. He had discovered that people were being abducted in that small post-industrial coal mining town by UFO's that seemed to originate from the area of the local disused mines.
We went to investigate with an expert in military communications and took the road round the back of the old mine, spotting some rather fancy aerials coming out of seemingly abandoned prefabricated huts that belonged to some sort of military operation.
Neil Cunningham, then of BUFORA, then informed us that Bonnybridge was adjacent to one of the largest power substations in western Europe.
It was bigger than the one that supplied Paris or German heavy industry on the Rhine or Ruhr, it was bigger than Moscow or the Refining port of Rotterdam in Holland and it was bigger than the one for London.
Therefore, what was it doing there supplying BP refinery at Grangemouth and a couple of bad fish and chip shops.
When we went to investigate this as part of our empirical field research we happened across a fish and chip shop that was so bad that we thought we were being served deep fried chupacabra. (chupacabra being the weird blood sucking alien monster that seems to bother South America etc) Chupacabra and chips seemed to be the specialty around there.
As we watched the landscape from our high hill, we were passed several times in different directions from different roads by a Pizza Van that bristled with aerials. Maybe they were eavesdropping and had discovered that pizza was a better deal for us all.
Our resident ex-military communications expert used to work in similar vans during the cold war.
What was going on in these hollow hills ?
One night, I pulled into a local diner and ordered a coffee and sat down at one of the tables. Sitting across from me was a young lady that I seemed to recognise. She looked something like me when I was nineteen. Her hair and eye colouring were the same, but she had instead though, a petite nose and pointed chin and was a very beautiful young lady. She smiled at me and leaned across and asked me to pick up something that she had dropped under her table because she could not reach it.
I went down on my hands and knees to have a look then she pressed with her hands on my back between my shoulder blades. Next I felt a rush of energy and life in me and I looked up quizzically.
I could feel myself almost linking with her.
She said that I was like her 'old Man' then she got up and left.
'Old man' in Scotland is Scottish vernacular for 'father'.
Her date of birth looked like the mid eighties and strangely enough that co-incided with strange episodes of interaction in my life.
The question is therefore - had I just interacted with my daughter who was also the child of some non-human race.
Children should know something about their parents and have a link to that ancestral vine for in many ways it adds context to our ongoing development of who and what we are.
Did she have any of my bad habits ?
Did she spend too long in those Martian Nightclubs ?
What kind of transformation might be going on in my very strange family of the future ?
Or was all of this just some very strange co-incidence or worse still some dark confidence trick ?
I don't really believe in co-incidences.
There did, however, seem to be rather a lot of interest in what we were doing in Bonnybridge for some reason - might there be some rather big installation underground and were they using all that electricity to power up a Stargate ? or some other kind of huge power-hungry Alien installation.
Another relatively unknown fact about the Falkirk UFO triangle was that it also had another name amongst the TV pundits who followed the National Lottery. It was called the 'golden circle', as, co-incidentally, at that time the area had the highest number of lottery winners and lottery millionaires in that area than anywhere else on mainland UK.
The mystery of underground Scotland seemed to be that there was rather a lot of it and whoever had put it all together was far older than mankind.
Abductee John W was taken to see the Emperor Grey in a cavern system lined from floor to ceiling with rows and rows of cubicles in which reposed his people.
'What do you want here ?' asks John W. The reply was 'Sanctuary !'
Co-incidentally the estate of Torphichen in West Lothian was an ancient Templar sanctuary belonging to the Knights of St John.
Near Bathgate a town on the south of the triangle is a place called Cairnpapple hill. It was one of the highest points for miles anywhere and had a commanding view over all the Lothians including Edinburgh to the south and Falkirk to the north.
It was somewhat adjacent to the Templar 'sanctuary' of Torphichen.
The hill, though was special, and was one of the biggest and most important bronze age finds in Scotland.
Its top was shaped like the dome of a flying saucer, and looking inside the mound itself there appeared to be even more resemblance to a UFO control room made in stone with stone slabs, presumably mock up doors leading off and down into the hill.
People that take dowsing rods there swear that there is a massive convergence of big ley lines on that hill and as usual, it being high ground, the military have a big satellite and microwave transmitter on it.
When we went there skywatching a light would go on in the military facility that would switch off when we left - and we usually went nowhere near it, preferring that the coffee in our thermos flask was not
Super-heated by over exposure to industrial strength microwaves.
We would stand there some nights feeling like we were General Custer as the glowing ships, circling, came and went around us.
We went through the usual exclusions: no landing lights, no noise, no strobes, too fast, not satellites because of their ability to do a 180, the Transformation Studies Group were well into the art of sceptical observation.
The story of this amazing hill is interesting as sometime in the early 1900's Mrs Dalyell, Mother of Tam, the Scottish politician, and his brother who was later killed in world war 2, had taken her two little boys on a picnic to the local hillside.
Cairnpapple hill just looked like an ordinary big hill then.
She had recently given Tam's brother a new raincoat and properly clothed against the elements she had sent them off to play whilst she prepared her picnic.
The younger brother came back without his raincoat.
His mother scolded him and asked him what he had dome with it and he replied that he had 'given it to the brown boy'.
The brown boy had subsequently vanished into the hill.
Mrs Dalyell, searched the hillside up and down but could find no trace of her son's new coat, but she realised that on closer examination that her experience in archaeology had enabled her to spot something unusual about the lay-out of the hill top.
She instigated the dig and thereby caused the discovered an important Bronze Age site that had not been recognised for millennia.
I was explaining the story of the Cairnpapple hill discovery to Paul and Bob who were interested in the other strange happenings in the same locality. There were Ghostly Knights on horseback in full armour, tall aliens in silver suits jumping in front of cars, large stone graves with giant skeletons whose legs had to be broken to fit them into the sarcophagi and other strange happenings as groups came and went around the local standing stones at the full moon.
UFO flybys here were regular.
I had got Paul and Bob onto the north facing slope of the dome itself and was just explaining how the little Dalyell boy had given his raincoat over to the brown fairy boy when the entire top of the hill shook like it was an earthquake.
It wasn't an earthquake though it was just confined to where we were on Cairnpapple hilltop. Under our feet somewhere below, we could hear the sound of stone grinding on stone and echoing in some cavernous chamber as a huge stone door seemed to slowly and thunderously grate open in welcome.
The two were stunned and perplexed.
Seemingly, a portal had just opened for us.
It did seem that the Transformation Studies Group had opened a portal to an entirely surreal world.
Our group had visitations from all corners of the alphabet soup mentioned in David Icke books including a strange professor from America who had allegedly access to the real American X files, underground facilities and had debriefed ex Vietnam veterans who had survived direct heavy machine gun fire because they were glowing gold.
We had Mi6, Mi5, Di55, CIA, MK-Ultra, the SAS, the Rainbow Army, the Amazon Army, Knights Templar, Rosicrucians, the Knights of St George, Miracle Productions, High Priestesses, the NSA, Special Boat Services, Alchemists, Masons, anarchists, co-counsellors, artists, musicians, Hindu adepts, Doctors of Philosophy, Doctors of Ethnomusicology, Paranormal researchers, abductees, Illuminati,
The idea was to keep the coffee and choccy biscuits coming.
We were somewhat interrupted by an internal dispute within the Theosophical Society in Scotland in the year 2000, and often alone in the building at night cleaning up I didn't appreciate also having to pick up the pictures that came flying off the walls at me from some unhappy entity - a resident spook of quite another sort !
Thus its fair to say that in its time between 1996 and the year 2000 the Transformation Studies Group with its meetings, talk program and Skywatches, cinema outings etc was a great place to be on Tuesday night in Edinburgh.
