Exotic energy.

What wiser are we for fifty years of UFO's
put down to air-ships, planes, and planets,
secret weapons, weather balloons and space junk,
a mirage and fair share of foto fakes?
The Middle Ages put crop circles
down to mowing devils, still extant.
Hoaxes leave no energy trace when dowsed.
Your more sensitive ancestors sited
megaliths and mounds close to natural forces
along ley lines for a prehistoric grid
to light-up psychic states of consciousness.
Of the many-fractured Pennines, the Craven Hills,
most favored by UFO's, were "wick wit fairies".
These cave and pot-hole dwellers showed best
come mid-night, melting into thin air at cock-crow.
The world's miners sought lodes from fairy lights
or fiery dragons guarding treasure trove.

A mis-reported pilot began legend
of "flying saucers" dazzled by blue-white flash
mostly before changed motion. An echelon
of discoid flyers hugged faulted terrain
between three peaks of the Cascades. Mount Helens
was to erupt after lightnings and luminous
displays told of classical Vesuvius.
In north-east America, glowing "balloons" crossed
at latitude and time of the Tashkent earth-quake.
Pliny the Elder saw night suns' sparking shields
"Chinese lantern" red, white or amber, mainly.

The ball lightning, scientists doubted,
paraded before one, down a plane aisle.
In hot dark down-pour, squeezing thru a window-slit
a "soap bubble" crossed the room to burst a drain-pipe.
Fuzzy-edged fizzing and hissing or humming
bluish or yellow-white ball of orange core
writhed worms of light's rapid short movements
seemed come out smooth overall, in a balance
of probable pathways, like Feynman's "sum
over histories," escaped the quantum scale.

The great Welsh lights show, of 1904 to 5,
brain-stormed a religious revival
before fault-line quakes from Harlech to Barmouth
road landing-stripped low-flying formations.
Two white lights waited upon one, blood red.
The curtain-raiser, from the sea to a mile inland
mountain top, was an aurora of an arch.
Over one cloud-capped summit, light framed
a black "bottle", with bright blue base, fountained
rainbows of fire on all sides of the slope.
A rounded triangle changed chapel roof ends
and a great star flashed forth diamond-fashion.
Light columns spewed smoky vapor or light balls.
Lights radiated, collided and exploded.

Eighty years on, in Cwm Canol, a sphere's
purple fluorescence silently exploded
in a shower of sparks to emerge a white disc.
A yellow-green light, rose from quarry to clouds,
coming down, near a road, rotating red
inside a brilliant white globe. Later,
the sky lit-up and a disk of spinning
multi-colored stripes flew close to Meliden Hills.
Todmorden had over one hundred UFO's:
Tunneling thru mist, a giant soft "light bulb",
with black hole beneath, hover-crafted over
wood markers, followed by two bleating sheep.
Branches shook. Ears popped. A frit police-man
found himself parked further on, missing the time.
In the road he found swirls. Hanging hugely,
glow red on bluish green, a gold shimmer
of spinning top arched over Rossendale.

Nature is the mother of invention.
Gyroscopes feature from atomic spin
to precession of planetary orbits.
Earth lights with a Saturn ring seemingly
field electric versions of the gyro wheel.
A grey "flying saucer" revolving red glows
shot off flattened circle in red after-glow.
A glow-orange "saturn" halted a generator,
on again, lightless from burnt-out wiring.
Its own generator, the UFO
wind-powered off branches, and rocked
as vertical rotors stabilize ship's roll.
Six beams of lightning struck the ground.
Heat wave hit a farmer, shocked and paralysed.
His attacking dog froze, dying from radiation.
The saturn, changed glow-red, shot away.

Only electrified twisters can descend.
Crop circle stems weave into straw baskets
with base hard and dry from compression
and vapor suction by the vortex chimney.
Corn sheaves swathed in opposing rings show
counter-rotating sheaths of the vortex.
So conserving angular momentum
helps stabilise a gyroscope.
Low pressure troffs, hot spots, breeze eddies
around steep slopes, arbored corrals whirl-pool air.
Oranged water vapor or other chemical
glows stir in thunder-storms, power lines' force fields,
water-falls, river commotion, waves on rocks.
Air stirs "cascade ionize" in a "pinch effect"
of their magnetic field: at lowered pressure
less electric resistance makes air fluoresce.
Rate of spin and ion content govern shape,
discoid, spheroid, conical or cigar.

A "plasma" vortex far out-lasts ball lightning
drawing in air to replace consumed ions.
Suction makes observers feel "light".
The funnel alters speech acoustics.
To Perth, bright light paced and lifted a car,
tearing off the roof rack, bursting a tyre,
to passengers' distorted shouts and screams.
Ionizing gas radiates on a broad band
of frequencies, jamming radios and ignitions.
Masts, pylons, metals attract or repel plasma.
Pressure contrast dazed an Australian eagle
flown at rival pulsating yellow monster,
hovering over panic-stricken lambs,
with high-pitched whine of helicopter revvings.
Fluorescent lights softly hum. A vortex
is match for generators or emits
shattering screech, up and down, of jet engines.
Noise level measures jet power's air-speed
excess over its plane or vortex slipstream.

Micro-waves fired into a small test chamber
of air at normal pressure create plasma fire,
split, like ball lightning, and defied wind flow.
Like some out-size quantum tunneler,
thru ceramic board, it escaped the chamber
for few seconds after power off.
Laid aluminum powder detected rings.
Engineers wised Professor Ohtsuki
to dust circles in Tokyo's underground.
Electric trains raise mini-vortices, track-side
even triplet models of grouped crop circles.
Joined vortices pre-figured the "theta pinch"
effect's alternative plasma-juggling
fusion design, to the pinch effect,
with perimeter current round a whole system.
Near ground, fast rotating domes in formation
spiralled grass flat with massive blast-off's
rapid climb into cloud, jetting white vapor.

From Close Encounters of the Third Kind
to close encounters of the Earth kind,
death of the UFO augurs resurrection
of space-ships, alien only as we to ourselves.
Crawling the solar system, rocket ships
over-shoot unless thrust decellerates
half-way between stops, taking twice the time.
Near the Pinnacles of California,
light streaked and swirled across the sky, spreading
an apparent shock wave ( as if massive)
until stopped without decelleration
( so of no mass ) going into a spin
to dissipate its light form energy.
Nuclear fission reactors' emitted electrons
can out-strip light thru their water surround
to set off glowing light waves, like a shock wave
from a plane faster than sound in air.
Suppose Cherenkov radiation by tear-away
electrons, from the ion-compact vortex,
faster than light under normal air pressure.

To forestall use of radio-active fission
as a trigger for nuclear fusion,
Helium-3 would have to be mined from the Moon.
In fusion, light elements or their isotopes
become ion gas at stellar temperatures.
Plasma, since 1991, can be held -
without a holder, vaporising
at the heat needed for fusion reaction.
A magnetic field pinch on charged particles
leaves research problem of plasma leakage.
Suppose Welsh mount's "bottle", of fiery pourings,
a magnetic bottle leaking plasma rainbows
in wave-band emissions across the spectrum.
Fusion designs bottle plasma in a torus.
Its low pressure of less particles
sooner heats to energies fusion needs,
tho re-action takes longer and must release
energy enough to hold temperature
and magnetic field for power supply.
Nature's electrified vortex holds plasma,
hints at both electro-magnetic powered and
fusion-reactored gyroscopic propulsion.

Plasma of earth lights, conserved in a vortex
for longer life, appear alive, seeking out
lines of least electrical resistance.
Witnesses have sworn the lights act with them ­
or human bodies' own electric fields.
Nelya Mikhailova's attracting and repelling
telekinesis marked physiological extremes
maybe ionizing radiation's magnetic
control of things not normally magnetic.
ESP research was a state secret.
A light switch was first rigged for response
to brain-waves operators learn to regulate.
Consciousness could computer-regulate
gyro-ships quick and versatile as thought itself.
The plasma vortex compares to living things:
A field "brain" to vortex body lives
on fresh air to replace consumed ions.
Since shamanic times, the body has been believed
the vehicle for a spirit body, in turn
a tool of universal consciousness, mystics
even physicists suspect all life partakes of.





Notes:

Main source: "Earth Lights" by Paul Devereux.

The Burrows-Meaden vortex is the theory that electrified vortices account for some "flying saucer" UFOs and the leaving of some crop circles.
Jenny Randles wrote a book in support of Terence Meaden's theory and took pranksters to task for spoiling farmers' crops. However, hoaxers did manage to fool Mr Meaden as to whether a crop circle was a genuine natural phenomenum.

Engineer, Sandy Kidd ( "Beyond 2001" ) tried propulsion by gyro alignments and wondered why others hadnt.

McGraw Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology,
for nuclear fusion and gyroscopes.
A megawatt of power was first produced by nuclear fusion at Oxford in 1991. The world's first nuclear fusion plant is to be built in France, the biggest joint scientific venture on the planet, only exceeded by the international space station.

Cherenkov is also spelt Cerenkov.

Popular explanations of quantum theory are to be found onwards from
Paul Davies: "Other Worlds".
Davies was also the general editor of "Physics", a standard text, by Alonso and Finn, with that nugget of information about Helium-3.


Further comment:

As I have also written ( on my next web page ) against nuclear fission power, in one of three satires, The Radioactivists, I wouldnt like to leave the impression that exotic energies are the only alternative energies.
"The Guardian" supplement "Life" gives both sides of the energy debate. Those in favor of both renewable and non-polluting energy give what they claim to be a viable package of low impact power sources. Despite lack of serious funding from government or energy firms, promising new domestic product or development in wind turbines and solar cells, for example, was recently reported.
Note, october 2005: I'd just got this reference put up when I found out The Guardian had finished with "Life", its popular science supplement, the only one there was.


Richard Lung.
( Written in the 1990s and revised Summer 2005.
This verse is something of a sister to Alienated, on my web-site: Poetry and novels of Dorothy Cowlin. )