Greg Black Flashback — 1997: The Loring UFOs & The Great Went
Editorial note: Some readers may observe that it’s been two years since I wrote an article for this blog. This was due to putting UFOs on the backburner while working on a big human rights investigation. But I’m ready to get back into it as 2020 is an exciting time for UFOlogy thanks to Tom DeLonge & TTSA. This article takes a look at another compelling connection between UFOs & rock music.
Last week’s excellent new retrospective from journalist Brett Tingley on the legendary 1975 UFO incident at the Loring Air Force Base in Limestone, Maine has inspired yours truly to reflect back on this classic incident as well. As Tingley noted, “When it comes to cases involving unidentified flying objects, few are as well documented or involve as many people as what occurred at Loring in 1975.”
Tingley’s article leads this reporter to flashback to 1997 however, since that was the year in which I first read of the Loring UFOs. It was the fateful year in which I became a UFOlogist, as I took a deep dive down the cosmic rabbit hole in research for an X-Files script I wanted to write and pitch to the show. I was a couple years out of college with a relatively worthless liberal arts degree and had moved to Los Angeles with aspirations of breaking into the tv/film biz, so why not?
I’d been a casual fan of The X-Files during the first few years of the series but got deeper into the topic matter in part thanks to Bryce Zabel’s Dark Skies television show, based around the compelling premise that the JFK assassination was part of the UFO cover-up. Dark Skies coincided with season 4 of The X-Files in 1996–97, which also riffed on the JFK assassination in the classic “Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man” episode (in which the show’s primary villain was revealed to have been responsible for planning and staging the execution.) So there was some synergy there as The X-Files seemed to be evolving in conspiratorial intrigue right along with Dark Skies.
I thought I should do some serious research for this project, if I wanted to position myself as a budding expert on the topic. And so I asked myself the fateful question, “If I were Special Agent Fox Mulder, what would I be looking into these days?” One item that kept popping up was the town of Sedona, Arizona being a UFO hotspot due to the energy vortexes there. Sedona was only a day’s drive from LA, so it wasn’t long before I decided to conduct some field research.
This isn’t an article about that life-altering trip to Sedona in the spring of ’97 (I wrote one many years ago), so I’ll just sum it up real quick: Two friends and I were amazed by the majestic vibe of Cathedral Rock and decided to camp there, about a quarter mile up the trail from the parking lot on Back of Beyond Road (right where the people are in the pic to the left). Camping in Sedona at sites like Cathedral Rock is sadly no longer legal, but back then it was feasible and felt like the thing to do.
The Hale Bopp Comet was prominent in the sky and we were listening to some vintage Grateful Dead circa 1969 when we experienced a compelling close encounter of the first kind in the 10 pm hour— we sighted a pulsing red orb to the northeast that performed dazzling anti-gravity moves for about 30 to 60 seconds before returning to a normal flight path. It then flew off slowly to the northwest until it went out of view. This was quite amazing to witness and left me with a feeling of profound spiritual connection to the cosmos.
The sudden and instantaneous acceleration at impossible angles that we observed is among the five observables which To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science has noted “are uniquely associated with Unidentified Aerial Phenomena or UAPs.” The craft was clearly powered by unearthly technology or reversed engineered from the same. So it was a stunning moment in which it became no longer a question of are we being visited, but who is visiting Earth and why? All of a sudden, my life had become an X-Files episode of its own!
There was further intrigue from both sides of the timeline, as this sighting occurred shortly after the Phoenix Lights incident and Heaven’s Gate cult suicide, and right before the mysterious disappearance of Air Force Captain Craig Button in Arizona (see this prior Greg Black Flashback story for more on all that.)
The UFO Cover-Up - Chapter 2: “Intrusions at Loring”
If I was wading into UFOlogy before, I was now into the deep end and well past the point of no return. There wasn’t nearly as much UFO information online back in 1997 as there is now, so I was reading a lot of books on the subject that I’d pick up on the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica at Midnight Special, Borders or Barnes & Noble. One of these titles I came upon in the spring of ’97 was The UFO Cover-Up by Lawrence Fawcett & Barry J. Greenwood, with a foreword by the late great Dr. J. Allen Hynek (this version was a re-publication of the original 1984 title, Clear Intent: The Government Coverup of the UFO Experience).
“The authors have made revealing use of documents… which show that the ‘CIA and NSA protestations of innocence and lack of interest in UFOs are nothing short of prevarication.’ The implication of these documents (and of those whose existence has been established in court but whose release was forbidden by those courts on grounds that national security might be jeopardized) are indeed far-reaching,” read a quote from Hynek’s foreword that appeared on the back cover.
It is not the purpose of this article to go back over the 1975 Loring incident in detail, since that’s what Brett Tingley did so well last week. Suffice it to say that the the book’s second chapter was devoted to the “Intrusions at Loring” and kudos to Tingley for also finding an online link to that entire chapter. Reading about how the nuclear supply depot of an American air force base was buzzed by a UFO with “clear intent” was intriguing, even more so that it was part of a wave of UFO incidents at northern tier bases in that fall of ‘75.
What was really compelling about the book as a whole was what Hynek summarized at the beginning — how a U.S. District Court ruled in the 1982 case of Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS) vs. National Security Agency that release of the documents sought from the NSA “could seriously jeopardize the work of the agency and the security of the United States.” The court further ruled that “public interest in disclosure is far outweighed by the sensitive nature of the materials and the obvious effect on national security their release may well entail.”
This had therefore been a watershed moment for the UFOlogy movement since it proved that Uncle Sam was lying when government agencies claimed that they didn’t investigate UFOs since there ostensibly was no such phenomenon, as the Air Force tried to claim when they closed Project Blue Book in 1969.
The Spring ’97 Phish newsletter arrives heralding The Great Went
And then the spring newsletter from the popular Vermont-based jam rock band Phish arrived in my mailbox. This issue announced the 1997 summer tour, heralding a two-day festival dubbed the Great Went to be held at none other than the Loring Air Force Base in Limestone, Maine on August 16–17 to conclude the tour.
The synchronicity was stunning. Phish was a band that I’d first caught live in 1994 and then got much more into in 95-96 as they became a favorite due to their stupendous improvisational talents. They had in fact just shared the cover of the Rolling Stone with The X-Files in February, one of many synchronistic occurrences in that most cosmic year of 1997. Now, right in the same time frame that I’d had this amazing UFO sighting in Sedona, Phish was announcing they would conclude their summer tour at the remote former air force base where I’d just read of this documented UFO incident!
And to top it off, the festival would take place on the 10-year anniversary of the Mayan Harmonic Convergence, no less (also on the anniversary dates of the Woodstock Festival in 1969, as was Phish’s first festival named the Clifford Ball at the Plattsburgh Air Force Base in 1996.)
It was quite an intriguing set of circumstances. Was Phish setting up the Great Went as an attempt at initiating contact in a Close Encounters of the Third Kind style, via music, light and color? It sure seemed like it. This reporter was increasingly growing to believe that there is no such thing as coincidence (though levels of synchronistic meaning can certainly vary widely.) And so, rather than be content with merely catching the west coast shows as I might have been, I was forced to conclude that there were higher powers at work. I felt called to follow the tour across the country to share this information with the fanbase and attend the Great Went at the Loring Air Force Base.
The dates of the festival were intriguing as well, since I’d also been getting into the Mayan calendar during this time frame. Books like Terence McKenna’s The Archaic Revival and Barbara Hand Clow’s The Pleiadian Agenda had piqued my interest in the 2012 alignment and I’d been continuing to pursue the research.
It was in June of ’97 that I came across a book titled Surfers of the Zuvuya by Mayan scholar/prophet Jose Arguelles. Jose was the one who had called for the Harmonic Convergence, when millions journeyed to sacred sites on August 16–17, 1987 for what was billed as the first synchronized global peace meditation. His most well known book The Mayan Factor had been rather dense and technical though, whereas Surfers of the Zuvuya really put his deep metaphysical concepts into a more tangible context.
One of the most compelling concepts that Arguelles conveyed in Surfers was that the Mayan calendar was an index that synchronized the universal 4D time frequency with Earth’s 3D frequency, and that 4th dimensional reality was recreated or brought into being in the 3rd dimension via the overtones of music, light and color. Having been a big fan of psychedelic rock — first through the Grateful Dead and now with Phish — this concept resonated in a deep way. And it made sense in that Close Encounters of the Third Kind concept of using these overtones in the attempt to reach out to beings from a higher dimension. These concepts may be too metaphysical for some in the nuts and bolts crowd, but I know I’m not alone in the UFOlogy field in having concluded that we must explore both the scientific and metaphysical aspects of “the Phenomenon” if we our to get a grasp on the whole picture of the Truth that’s out there.
There was also another significant event in UFOlogy history that occurred in June of ’97, that being the Air Force’s mind-bending “Roswell Case Closed” press conference. Watching the Air Force put forth their preposterous story about crash test dummies from the 1950s to explain an incident that occurred in 1947 was some genuine cognitive dissonance that further assured me I was on the right track (and I wrote up another little Greg Black Flashback story on that too.)
Sidenote: Phish’s “Scent of a Mule” — “Better than a UFO”
It was also during this time after my spring UFO sighting in Sedona and before Phish’s summer tour started that I grokked a deeper insight into their song “Scent of a Mule”. It’s a bluegrassy tale written by bassist Mike Gordon that references an odd encounter with some extraterrestrial visitors, recorded for their 1994 album Hoist. I’d previously thought it was kind of a dumb song because I wasn’t really into bluegrass yet (or UFOs for that matter.) But now the tale of ET visitors to a rural farm who decided they liked the elegance and “lightness” of a southern home better than their UFO was making a lot more sense.
And so I teamed up with some like-minded friends on an adventure to follow the tour from the west coast to the east coast (doing some vending in the lot scene along the way to help finance the trip.) The band was on fire that summer, as they’d been moving into a cosmic funk jamming style that year which saw their sound evolving in an exciting way. There was also a touching tribute to the dearly departed Jerry Garcia when the band played the Shoreline Ampitheater in Mountain View, California on the eve of Garcia’s birthday, as well as a surprise collaboration with Ken Kesey & the Merry Pranksters at the show in Darien Lake, New York near Buffalo right before the Great Went. All of which made it feel like the torch for the psychedelic rock counterculture had truly been passed to Phish as the Great Went beckoned.
It is not the purpose of this article to go into detail on why Phish is one of the greatest bands in rock history. Suffice it to say that the formidable combination of their improvisational prowess, incredibly diverse songbook and uncanny knack for topping themselves has made this quartet of Gen-X troubadours a musical force of nature over the past four decades.
The Great Went — “an easy drive from any direction”
The team-up with the Merry Pranksters at the Darien Lake show was fitting in many ways, including Phish’s own prankster nature. Hence billing the festival in the newsletter as “an easy drive from any direction,” when Loring was in fact one of the most remote locations in the continental United States. As with their first festival in 1996, Phish drew somewhere around 70,000 attendees for a weekend that featured six sets of music, a massive camp ground that was like a city of its own, and good times that felt like a near-utopian alternate reality.
Bear in mind that this was before the festival boom that occurred in the early part of 21st century, when the Bonnaroo Festival built off the fan-friendly format of the large Phish festivals in 2002 to catalyze a huge growth sector in the music industry. The Great Went was the the top grossing rock concert in the United States in 1997.
The first day on August 16 certainly had its share of highlights, although it was mostly cloudy throughout the day and into the evening, so there wasn’t much skywatching to be done. But circumstances would align the next day and it’s the second set from August 17 that lives in Phish legend to this day. A 27-minute jam on the anthemic “Down With Disease” showed that the band was really going for it. This was followed by the classic “Bathtub Gin”, with an uplifting jam for the ages as Phish’s collective talent for gelling as one delivered a cathartic melodic exploration that’s widely cited as one of the greatest moments in band history. This jam was such a hit that the Went Gin has been analyzed with a fanatical attention no other band’s fan base engages in, with one blogger aptly noting that “A truly memorable Phish jam won’t just defy your expectations as a listener, it will cause you to experience emotions that you didn’t know existed.” In this sense, Phish have long been a phenomenon unto themselves.
It was here during this historic “Bathtub Gin” jam that this observer sighted an anomalous craft off in the distance, looking away from the stage, that caught the eye with its green and red lights. It first appeared to be simply hovering like a helicopter, but it soon began to make little moves back and forth, almost as if it were sharing in the groove?! This was pointed out to a female companion who agreed that it was quite something. The craft wasn’t doing anti-gravity moves, but the way it was moving from side to side was compelling. Of course no one else saw it because it was in the opposite direction of the stage.
That was the only thing resembling a UFO this reporter saw at Loring that weekend, but it was not last we would see of unusual phenomena during that historic show. After a quick romp through Bill Monroe’s “Uncle Pen”, the band launched into an extended jam on “Also Sprach Zarathustra” (aka “2001”) which had grown into a fan favorite thanks to how Phish covers the groovy arrangement crafted by Brazilian composer Eumir Deodato. Normally performed in a 5–10 minute range, Phish extended the infectious groove here to more than 20 minutes band members took turns painting on pieces of wood, as they had begun doing at the end of the “Down With Disease” jam.
“Ok, so what we’ve been doing here this weekend is an idea that came out of the fact that when we jam up here, we always feel there’s a mutual energy going on between everybody, the four of us and all of you guys and something is being created. We don’t only feel it, we know it,” Anastasio explained at the end of the 2001 jam. “So, a lot of you during the weekend have probably been walking around to the edges and helping paint on pieces of wood. Some of you have done it and some of you haven’t, but still there’s been wood spread out all over the place and paint and a lot of different people have been painting on this wood. And while we were playing up here, kind of catching a groove of the show and everything, we did a little painting ourselves…
“And the whole idea here, is something that we’ve been wanting to try since last year and this is, going to be the debut of this idea, is to do a mutual piece of art with you guys and us, all built into one thing that was represented throughout the weekend. And so that’s it over there, right there, is the result of all of you and us together. And what we’re going to do right now is put our piece on to the art to add to the stuff that you guys have painted. So that together, and we didn’t know what it was going to be, it was completely improvisational, it was supposed to be the same kind of spirit as the music, we get up here and don’t know what’s going to happen and we just go for it,” Anastasio elaborated as the band’s piece of art was passed through the audience to be added to a tower of the audience art that looked to somewhat resemble the climactic structure from the Burning Man festival.
The band then launched into their classic “Harry Hood”. When they’d played through the song and reached the jam segment, Anastasio asked lighting director Chris Kuroda to turn out the lights so they could just jam with the moon (as they had done two weeks earlier at the Gorge Ampitheater in Eastern Washington.) The energy in the audience surged here and would surge higher still a few minutes later when a large number of audience members started throwing glow sticks up into the air. People kept picking them back up and throwing them back into the air again, creating a magical loop of transcendent psychedelia that the band latched onto and started jamming to, as the audience-band feedback loop went to an unprecedented level to catalyze a most memorable jam to close the set.
“Alright, we’re going to take another break and then we’re gonna come back and play more. So keep throwing those things up in the air because it looks amazing, you have no idea. Go get some more of those things man,” Anastasio said in wonder. This was the original spontaneous glow stick war, something that would go on to become a perennial phenomenon at Phish shows ever since, particularly at the larger shows and festivals .
The band came back for a third set, though it was largely anti-climactic after the incredible second set that remains hallowed as one of the greatest in band history (a seemingly mandatory performance of “Scent of a Mule” did serve as some icing on the Loring cake though.) And then they burned the art tower during the encore, making a statement about the transient nature of the entire event.
The tour had been an inspiring counterculture adventure and this reporter certainly got everything he was looking for. But the intrigue would deepen further back in Los Angeles that fall with the discovery of channeler Lyssa Royal’s book, Preparing for Contact. I’d developed mixed feelings about channeling, as the field was no doubt littered with charlatans. But there were some here and there who perhaps seemed to be conceivably tuned into genuine contact with higher dimensional beings. I’d developed a sentimental attachment to the Sedona Journal of Emergence, which regularly featured channeled material, but generally took it with a grain of salt. There was a passage in Royal’s book that really resonated though, in which she queries an alleged Pleiadian being about a good way to try to initiate contact with ETs.
Question: You mentioned that ETs will act upon the human group’s spontaneous readiness for contact when our conscious, subconscious, and
unconscious minds momentarily align in a common vibration. You have also stated the importance of creating an exciting, expansive atmosphere surrounding the contact experience. Could you suggest an activity for the group to do at the contact site in order to bring about this alignment?
Answer: …One example of a joint activity would be something artistic, like spontaneously creating a mural or a sculpture live in the moment…This is an example of being in the moment, following your excitement, and playing… If those criteria were met, hypothetically, and ETs were in the vicinity, we would key into your excitement and playful energy. If it were within our path to interact with your playful energy, we would simply find ourselves moved to be there with you to enjoy that energy.
This reporter’s jaw dropped upon reading that, as this was exactly what occurred at the Great Went. Had someone in the band’s inner circle read this? It sure seemed like it. Doing the mutual painting project to create an improv art tower in the midst of the concert at a location with a history of UFO activity on an auspicious date, it all added up compellingly. The synchronicity level was flat out amazing.
1998 — Return to Loring at The Lemonwheel
The Great Went was such a popular success that Phish would return to Loring a year later to conclude their 1998 summer tour with another festival dubbed The Lemonwheel on August 15–16. It was another incredible weekend of counterculture utopia with massive glow wars occurring a handful of times throughout the weekend that truly dazzled the senses.
Amazingly, this reporter did in fact witness another UFO at Loring, although this one occurred the night before the festival in the campgrounds on August 14 as a regional jamband named Deep Banana Blackout played to a small gathering of perhaps a few hundred people. I was taking in the set with a female friend who had also traveled out from California and was about to attend med school. We’d been hanging out that summer and she’d been intrigued with my UFO research to some degree, but she was a little more skeptical in the way that doctors and scientists tend to be, sort of a Scully to my Mulder as it were.
So there we were, taking in the funky music towards the back of the crowd when this observer noticed a strange blue light in the sky. It was a pinpoint of light, like a star, except that it was a vibrant sapphire blue color. I pointed this out to my friend, who initially didn’t think much of it — she was grooving to the music. A few minutes later, I noticed that the blue light had re-located to the other side of a fairly bright star. I pointed this out to her again, but she’s still not impressed. Then, the blue light starts moving toward the bright star.
“Ok, if that is a normal Earthly craft, it will appear to pass right over that star, because it’s headed right for it,” I suggested. On this point she had to concur and watched it with me. But as the blue light approached the star, it started slowly moving in a small arc, around the star, and then stopped and hovered on the other side of it.
“THAT is some kind of UFO and quite probably an extraterrestrial craft,” I declared matter of factly. At that point, she couldn’t help but be agreeable. I lamented the fact that the entire crowd could see it if they would just look up, but they were all too entranced by the music to notice. C’est la vie.
Phish would return to Loring one more time to close their 2003 summer tour with a festival simply named IT. This reporter was unable to attend that one, as it was a lean summer in which I could barely afford to drive down from LA to attend the San Diego show they played on that tour, much less fly across the country to Maine. But it was another legendary event with the band pushing the envelope with a late night bonus set from atop Loring’s primary control tower. Keyboardist Page McConnell even references the Loring UFOs from the ’70s in this video taken from an IT DVD that was released:
What it all means in the grand scheme of things is a question where the truth is still out there. One thing we do know is that music is the true universal language. Renowned musicians including Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, David Bowie, Sun Ra, Ace Frehley, Sammy Hagar and many more have reported UFO sightings that influenced them spiritually.
This would suggest that Earth’s hipper ET visitors have more to offer than just an inherent potential threat to national security due to their advanced technological capabilities. This body of evidence stands in stark contrast to longtime fear-mongering about an alien threat. Let the record therefore show that there would appear to be much more to getting a handle on “the Phenomenon” than just the militaristic approach that will predominate the attention of the Pentagon’s new UAP Task Force.
“The mission of the task force is to detect, analyze and catalog UAPs that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security,” reads the DoD’s press release from August 14, 2020.
The task force’s mission should have a much wider scope and the question arises as to whether it will attempt to develop “a science of UFOs”, as Professor Alexander Wendt from the Department of Political Science at The Ohio State University has called for (and has been working on developing with his group UFODATA, where he is joined on the board by notably esteemed researchers including Leslie Kean and Christopher Mellon.)
“Why are UFOs, almost uniquely among phenomena in nature, taboo to study scientifically, or even to just talk about seriously in public discourse?” Wendt asks, referencing his groundbreaking 2008 article “Sovereignty and the UFO” that appeared in the political science journal Political Theory. He goes on to speak of how the power of the state “depends on its citizens believing that there is no other agency above the state (even a Pope!), to which they might give their allegiance.”
This creates a quandary that calls for the advent of some sort of civilian UAP Task Force composed of thought leaders from the liberal arts & social sciences. Because as Wendt concludes with penetrating insight: “The modern state is incapable of even posing the question of whether UFOs are ETs, much less trying to answer it, because to do so would raise a question about its foundational assumption, and thus call its legitimacy into question.”
But just as a Pentagon UAP Task Force focused solely on analyzing UAPs that could be a threat to national security fails to address the whole picture of the truth that’s out there, so too does the UFODATA team by focusing solely on the science. This is most certainly a worthy endeavor for which the UFODATA team is to be commended. But Tom DeLonge is on to something with his concept of an investigation whose mission spans both arts and sciences. We need more of this, including more involvement from prominent artists and musicians.
There are those in the UFOlogy community who would try to insist on keeping politics separate from the issue of Disclosure. But when the rubber meets the road, Disclosure is ultimately an inherently political hot potato that can’t be tossed aside. For those who are inclined to believe that advanced ETs could have taken over the Earth long ago if they so desired, one thing is certain — the neo-fascist Trump regime and their ilk will never have anything to do with genuine Disclosure, since such a paradigm shifting act would be inherently democratizing thanks to the imminent advances in free energy technology & spirituality that comes with realizing we are not alone.
This is not to suggest that the neoliberal corporatists at the top of the Democratic Party are all that interested in Disclosure either. The Clintons and Obama would seem to have had their chances and failed to even move the ball down the field. These are also the people who went to great lengths to stop the insurgent presidential campaigns for political revolution led by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders. Yet while there are few progressives with passion for Joe Biden, it’s become imperative to back him to defeat the Trump regime in order to save what’s left of American democracy and give the political revolution room to grow. Removing the Trump regime from power is therefore also essential for the Disclosure movement.
When one looks at Sanders’ platform, we see a genuinely populist agenda (Medicare for All, Green New Deal, Fair Trade, Racial Justice, College For All) that is of the inherently democratizing nature which would put America on a path to where the corporatocracy would no longer be the tail that wags the dog. This is the type of administration we will probably be in need of to get a shot at real Disclosure.
And while Sanders’ window to seek the Presidency has sadly passed, the political revolution is blessed to have a new hope in Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Already breaking barriers as the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, Ocasio-Cortez has proven she’s an old soul with wisdom beyond her years with her bold progressive leadership and inspiring decision to endorse Sanders in 2019.
Finally, it’s worth noting for the record that Sanders rose to prominence as Mayor of the same town that birthed Phish— Burlington, Vermont. Coincidence? This reporter thinks not…
