TWIN PEAKS AND THE BLUE ROSE, by Rocko Van Buren

We here at the Daily Dirt Diaspora family of websites are proud to bring you this illuminating Guest Post about some of the more obscure elements of the magnificent Lynch/Frost creation Twin Peaks by our brilliant friend Rocko Van Buren. Enjoy! - YOPJ

“Through the dark of futures past

The magician longs to see

One chance out between two worlds

Fire walk with me”

- Bob

TWIN PEAKS, BLUE ROSE, AND THE UFO PHENOMENON

In the first few moments of Part 12 of the ongoing Showtime television event, Twin Peaks: The Return, the audience finally learns definitively what “Blue Rose” means in the context of Dale Cooper, Gordon Cole and the rest of the FBI. This exposition comes in a scene with FBI deputy director Gordon Cole, Albert Rosenfield and agent Tammy Preston sipping fine wine while seated in a private room at a hotel in Buckhorn, South Dakota, surrounded by red curtains (reminiscent of the mysterious Red Room itself), Albert explains Blue Rose is a secret extension of the now-closed, real-world Project Blue Book conducted by the U.S. Air Force to investigate UFO phenomena.

As the Air Force describes in it's own documentation, some of which is now publicly available through the Freedom of Information Act and quoted here from Wikipedia:

Project Blue Book was one of a series of systematic studies of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) conducted by the United States Air Force. It started in 1952, and it was the third study of its kind (the first two were projects Sign (1947) and Grudge (1949)). A termination order was given for the study in December 1969, and all activity under its auspices ceased in January 1970.
Project Blue Book had two goals:
1 To determine if UFOs were a threat to national security, and
2 To scientifically analyze UFO-related data.”

Prior to this revelation in Part 12 of The Return, fan-favorite character Maj. Garland Briggs from Twin Peaks original two seasons was the show's clearest connection to Project Blue Book and how the classified Air Force investigation connects to the White and Black Lodges of Twin Peaks lore.

Following a mysterious disappearance in Season 2 in the original run, upon which we will touch in greater detail later on, Briggs tells Cooper that even though Project Blue Book was disbanded, “There are those of us who continue in an unofficial capacity, examining the heavens as before, or in the case of Twin Peaks, the earth below. We are searching for a place called the White Lodge.”

Back in The Return, Albert explains to Agent Preston that Blue Book was shut down in 1970 as part of a “cover-up” that concluded the UFO phenomenon was not credible, and there was no resulting threat to national security.

“A few years later, the military and FBI formed a top secret task force to explore the troubling abstractions raised by cases Blue Book failed to resolve,” Albert explains. “We call it, 'The Blue Rose,' after a phrase uttered by a woman involved in one of these cases just before she died., which suggested these hazards could not be reached except by an alternate path we have been traveling ever since.”

Albert goes on to name the agents involved in this secret task force created by Cole – himself, lead agent Phillip Jeffries, Chet Desmond and the original show's main character, Dale Cooper. All of the special agents involved in Blue Rose, excepting Albert and Cole, have since disappeared. All this exposition is by way of recruiting The Return's newest FBI agent, Preston, into the fold of the Blue Rose task force. And thus we have the first explicit delineation from Project Blue Book straight to Blue Rose and the strange, occult aspects that surround the FBI's investigation into the murder of Laura Palmer in the Washington town of Twin Peaks (in the original TV series) and the murder of Teresa Banks in nearby Dear Meadow (in the film Fire Walk With Me).

While the original Twin Peaks run of 1990-921 owes much of its nostalgic love to its soap-opera-style story-lines, Cooper's frequent references to “damn fine coffee,” “the best cherry pie in the tri-counties,” and scenes like Audrey Horne engaged in a strange and seductive dance to music composed by Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti, it is the lore and mystery of Twin Peaks that always attracted me most. And while this aspect of the story was certainly included in the original run of the series, it was never as prominent on ABC prime-time as it was later on in the show's darker, stranger cousin, Lynch's 1992 film Fire Walk With Me (which was my introduction to the world of Twin Peaks). Nothing in the Twin Peaks ecosphere compares to the dark strangeness of Fire Walk With Me (which was originally intended as a series of three films; however, part two and three were never filmed because of the poor critical and financial reception to its first installment). While the inability of Lynch to continue the story in the 1990s was certainly disappointing to hardcore fans, without that failure, we may not have ever been able to experience 2017's revival of Twin Peaks via The Return, in which Lynch and Frost have continued their legacy of breaking new ground in television entertainment.

OUTSIDE OF TIME AND SPACE

Of the many oddities in Twin Peaks, the Black Lodge and its denizens, Bob, The One-Armed Man (aka Mike/Phillip Gerard) and The Man From Another Place (aka the arm) are it's most persistent and vexing. Where do they come from? What is their purpose? While there are many theories surrounding Twin Peaks culture about the meaning and origin of this place and its inhabitants, most of them ignore the connection to Project Blue Book, UFO phenomena and the possibility of alien life. My analysis will attempt to connect the line from Blue Book to Blue Rose, from the idea of UFO encounters and alien visitors to inhabiting spirits like Bob and his cohorts.

To understand this, we must first reconsider the popular conception of aliens – we are not speaking here about extraterrestrial beings in the sense depicted in Steven Spielberg's films E.T. or Close Encounters of the Third Kind. These are not little green men in flying saucers, nor necessarily “Greys,” “Reptilians,” “Nordics,” nor any of the other alien races promulgated by popular culture shows like Coast to Coast AM. (although some images in The Return do bear a striking resemblance to the alien “grey,” notably the being credited as “The Experiment/Mother” in Part Eight, the being in the black box in Part One, and the first scene in Andy's vision from Part Fourteen).

Instead, we are speaking of aliens as inter/extra-dimensional beings that inhabit our world and adjacent worlds unseen, the type of spirits discussed in dozens of Hindu and Buddhist legends, and, most eloquently in 'western' society, by well-known UFO researcher and PhD Jacques Vallée. Vallée, not coincidentally, was the inspiration for Spielberg's character Claude Lacombe, played in Spielberg's film Close Encounters by François Truffaut.

In an interview with Jeffrey Mishlove on the public television program Thinking Allowed, Vallée discusses his 1979 book Messengers of Deception:

JFK AND UFO CONSPIRACIES AUTHOR JIM MARRS HAS PASSED

The Fort Worth Star Telegram recently reported what many in the conspiracy community will consider to be tragic news:

Jim Marrs, the author whose book Crossfire: The Plot to Kill Kennedy helped inspire the Oliver Stone movie JFK, died of a heart attack Wednesday at his home outside in Wise County. Marrs, 73, who worked as a Star-Telegram reporter between 1968 to 1980, didn’t just write about John F. Kennedy. He also authored books about everything from UFOs to population control. 

Marrs also taught courses on the JFK assassination and UFO’s at the University of Texas at Arlington before retiring in 2007. In a 2003 Star-Telegram article, Marrs said lawyers, teachers, even an official with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had taken his classes. 

“They, like myself, have a natural and, I think healthy, questioning attitude about all this,” Marrs said. “What I tell people is, don't come here expecting me to have all the answers.” 

... Among his books were Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy, which reached the New York Times Paperback Non-Fiction Best Seller List. Other titles include: Alien Agenda (1997); Rule by Secrecy (2000); The Terror Conspiracy Revisited (2007); The Rise of the Fourth Reich (2008); The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy (2010); Our Occulted History (2013); Population Control (2015); and his last book, The Illuminati (2017).

On a personal note, your humble blogger read (and enjoyed) Crossfire, Rule by Secrecy, and Rise of the Fourth Reich, none of which achieved the academic rigor or journalistic integrity of the best of the genre (as exemplified, for instance, by Carroll Quiggley or Carl Oglesby), many of which were prone to flights of somewhat ludicrous fancy, but ALL of which contained intriguing ideas, dug up surprising facts, and made connections worthy of further study. 

Those three are also very well written and highly entertaining, and I was able to use Rule by Secrecy as a sort of gateway book via which I was able to re-ignite my father's passion for studying alternative theories of history and politics... something for which I will always remember Marrs with fondness. 

I was less fond, however, of his late-life cash-grab work that aimed to portray President Obama -- a mainstream, conservative Democrat whose fetish for decorum and bipartisanship hobbled his entire first term -- as some kind of Far Left "Communist" ideologue in the Castro/Chavez mold. 

But... those books didn't sell very well, and it was a bandwagon Marrs didn't spend much time on, so I can forgive and forget. Thinking about it now, I would love to hear Marrs' take on Trump. Unfortunately, that's a book we'll never get to read.

DDD SUGGESTED READING LIST ~ APRIL 9

1. Way back in the 1990's, yer old pal Jerky was one of the earliest online voices raising the alarm about the existential threat posed by robots to the near-term survival of the human race. My rants on the subject were frequent, but they were high on heat and low on substance. I didn’t really “know my stuff” as they say; the tech was way over my head. Nevertheless… I harbored some dark, intuitive hunches, and I let those hunches be known. Today, as the future unfurls, I continue to discover that not only was I correct to worry, but that a great many far brainier people than myself are shifting their views on the subject in ways that neatly dovetail with my own. Which brings us to Benjamin Wittes & Gabriella Blum’s over-titled new book “The Future of Violence—Robots and Germs, Hackers and Drones—Confronting a New Age of Threat”. Nick Romero’s recent review for The Daily Beast begins by asking the rhetorical question: "Will You Be Murdered by a Robot?" And the ride only gets bumpier from thereon out, beginning...

Wittes and Blum conjure a number of nightmarish scenarios: a drone hovers above a packed sports stadium and sprays invisible anthrax spores into air breathed by tens of thousands, a miniature robotic drone that looks exactly like a spider assassinates a businessman as he showers, a malign molecular biology graduate student modifies the smallpox virus to enhance its lethality and overcome vaccinations. 

Of course with a bit of technical knowledge and a good imagination, any thoughtful person can already eradicate the human race in all manner of weirdly engrossing hypotheticals. In fact some people, like the philosophers at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, seem to make a nice living by contemplating scenarios of mass death. But Wittes and Blum are not professional prophets of doom. Wittes is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, and Blum teaches at Harvard Law School. 

Their book doesn’t aim to convince us that terrifying but seemingly outlandish scenarios are in fact imminent. They start from the premise that the terrifying scenarios are not only possible, they’re almost certainly inevitable in some form. The essential task, then, is not to sketch in baroque detail the contours of particular horrific hypotheticals, but to develop a viable set of public and private tools to decrease the likelihood and diminish the severity of a large-scale catastrophe.

I haven't read the book, and based on Romero's review, I probably won't. There already exists a great deal of literature exploring the wide open philosophical frontier where the lure of liberty butts up against the need for security. Nevertheless, as a primer on that particular subject—and not so much on the particular and singular threat posed by our soon-to-be Mechanized Overlords—I do urge you to read Romero’s review. It serves as a decent kick-off point to learning more about a number of important 21st century topics.

2. As if robots weren't enough sci-fi for one Suggested Reading List, here comes The Independent UK with recent news that so-called "Blitzars"—an astronomical mystery that consists of bursts of energy that align in inexplicably mathematical patterns—are looking more and more like the result of some kind of advanced technological apparatus. And whatever technology it is that’s producing this phenomenon is not of human origin, folks. Read on...

Blitzars, which last only about a millisecond, have been detected by telescopes since about 2001 and have been heard ten times since. And nobody really knows where they come from, or why they happen. But a new study has found that the bursts line up in a way that is not explained by existing physics, reports the New Scientist.

Scientists tried to work out how far the bursts have travelled through space to get to us, using “dispersion measures”. That looks at how the radiowaves that are being sent get scattered as they travel through space — the higher the dispersion measure, the further that radiowaves seem to have been sent before they arrived. All of the ten bursts that have been detected so far have dispersion measures that line up as multiples of a single number: 187.5. The chances of them doing so are 5 in 10,000, the scientists behind the study claim.

John Learned, from the University of Hawaii in Manoa … said that the line-up was “very, very hard to explain”. … There is little reason for the bursts to line up in this way if they are being sent by natural bodies. … However, it may be that there is some astrophysics that scientists are yet to understand that has been driving the timing. It could also be that the signals are not coming from space at all, but form … a secret satellite that is hiding its messages so that they appear to come from much deeper in space. But the scientists conclude that if none of the other explanations work out, “An artificial source (human or non-human) must be considered”.

That's pretty much all the information from the article, condensed to roughly half size. If you feel like you need to read the rest of it, here is the link. 

3. You know, the real world or ordinary, everyday sceince is getting so out of hand these days, we soon won't be needing the likes of THE WATCHER to get our pseudo-sci-fi jollies and shivers anymore! Too bad, in a way. That site is an awesome living monument to what the Internet used to look like, back when IE and Netscape were the only games in tow! 

PUNISHMENT PARK (1971)

Both timely and timeless, documentarian Peter Watkins' Punishment Park is one of the most powerful and disturbing political films ever made. I noticed it was up again on Youtube. It won't be for long, but as long as it is, you could do a lot worse than spend 90 minutes soaking up this 10 megaton hauntological parapolitical mind-bomb of a film. Then, once you're done watching, learn about the remarkable circumstances of its creation.

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH ~ ILLUMINATI CARD GAME AGAIN

PARACULTURAL CALENDAR FOR FEBRUARY 28

On this day in 1525, the Aztec king Cuauhtémoc is executed by Hernán Cortés's forces.

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On this day in 1883, the first ever American "vaudeville" theater opens, in Boston. The entire entertainment industry as we know it ensues.

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On this day in 1933, "Gleichschaltung", the Reichstag Fire Decree is passed in Germany a day after the Reichstag fire.

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On this day in 1953, James D. Watson and Francis Crick announce to friends that they have determined the chemical structure of DNA; the formal announcement takes place on April 25 following publication in April's Nature (pub. April 2).

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On this day in 1954, the first color television sets using the NTSC standard are offered for sale to the general public.

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On this day in 1958, a school bus in Floyd County, Kentucky hits a wrecker truck and plunges down an embankment into the rain-swollen Levisa Fork River. The driver and 26 children die in what remains one of the worst school bus accidents in U.S. history.

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On this day in 1975, in London an underground train fails to stop at Moorgate terminus station and crashes into the end of the tunnel, killing 43 people.

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On this day in 1977, Marineland staff successfully breed a killer whale in captivity for the first time, thus marking the beginnings of the potentially lucrative but still highly secretive whale meat trade. Unfortunately, the Japanese continue to prefer free range whale meat, for the time being.

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On this day in 1983, the final episode of M*A*S*H airs on CBS. It breaks all previous records when 125 million people tune in to watch, and be disappointed by, the show.

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On this day in 1993, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents raid the Branch Davidian church in Waco, Texas with a warrant to arrest the group's leader David Koresh. Four BATF agents and five Davidians die in the initial raid, starting a 51-day standoff.

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On this day in 1997, GRB 970228, a highly luminous flash of gamma rays, strikes the Earth for 80 seconds, providing early evidence that gamma-ray bursts occur well beyond the Milky Way.

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On this day in 1998, first flight of RQ-4 Global Hawk, the first unmanned aerial vehicle certified to file its own flight plans and fly regularly in U.S. civilian airspace.

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On this day in 2013, Pope Benedict XVI resigns as the pope of the Catholic Church becoming the first pope to do so since 1415.

MEANWHILE, COULD THE CONSPIRACY COMMUNITY TURN ON THEIR HERO?

I'm starting to see signs that this may be the case. Unfortunately, Trump's online Redhat machine is both 'yuge' and sophisticated. Check back here and at our sister blog, the Daily Dirt Diaspora, for more on this topic in the coming weeks and months!