Throughout my life, I’ve faced traumatic experiences that I can easily recall, along with the memories and associated emotions.
For better or worse, these experiences are a part of me. The biggest one for me will always be the loss of my
brother, who was just 21 years old when he fell asleep and crashed his car on the NJ Turnpike. At this moment
Tony captured me, I was thinking about my brother and this ten-year-old video I found last year on YouTube.
In the video clip the actor Billy Bob Thornton shares his experience of losing his brother. He explains how this
loss has profoundly affected his outlook on life, leaving him with a persistent feeling of melancholy. Thornton
mentions that he never fully trusts happiness and often feels 50% happy and 50% sad. He advises people who
have lost a loved one to accept their feelings and honor them through their work or art. He emphasizes that
one never truly gets over such a loss but can learn to live with the pain and use it as a source of inspiration. I
relate deeply to his perspective and how he articulates his feelings.
I’ve shot In lots of studios. Most of them are commercial spaces repurposed to be a studio space. They have the normal advantages of commercials spaces. Large doors to load equipment, lots of wall sockets for power, high ceilings etc. With that stated those facilities have disadvantages. They are sterile and lack any hint of inspiration. Can one create in a space of this nature? Yes, but you will be fighting uphill.
Sometimes the space is shared with other projects that are going on at the same time. You could be right next to a group that is playing loud music and running equally loud equipment. All while you are trying to create a connection with the client, model or subject and share a flow of conscientiousness to generate the images that you want. You could negate the possibility of distractions by renting the entire facility, but that doesn’t remove the environmental aspect and would cost much more money. You will still be in a facility that is probably better suited to making widgets, than it is to making Art.
Tony Ward has curated the environmental aspect of his property to be as inspiring as it is functional and accommodating. As soon as you arrive at the enclave you will know that you are in a space that is dedicated to the creation, and appreciation of Art. You are surrounded by Art in various forms including artwork produced by members of his family, namely his father Milton Ward. The exterior walls of the studio are painted in a multi colored patterns, a direct homage to the paintings of his father. The walls of the Ward residence are covered in framed Art in several different mediums by a variety of artists. The furniture is mostly vintage mid century modern and arranged to promote gathering of minds to share ideas. Collections of sculpture, tools, books, and artifacts gathered over a lifetime of artistic endeavors are all on display. The entire property is an Art gallery, with space reserved for you to create your Art.
I was excited when I saw the announcement that the PBS science series NOVA was going to devote a program to UFOs. There have been several very good recent programs on NEWSNATION, so I had high hopes for PBS taking the subject seriously for a change.
Unfortunately, the NOVA program was a bunch of poorly researched nonsense. They ignored most of the good research done since at least the 1950s.
As just one example, Major Jesse Marcel, the man who first collected some of the debris from the Famous Roswell event, said on numerous occasions late in his life that the debris he was holding in the famous press conference photo was not the material he recovered from the Foster Ranch near Roswell, New Mexico in the summer of 1947. There was a coverup by the government, which was later admitted. But NOVA repeated the long debunked nonsense that what crashed was a Mogul Balloon Array.
I knew Jesse Marcel, Jr. He wrote the foreword for the 1997 book ‘Beyond Roswell,’ of which I was the coauthor.
Jesse Jr. was twelve years old when his father excitedly came home one night to show his wife and son some of the debris he’d collected on the Foster Ranch. It was not debris from a weather balloon, with which Marcel was quite familiar, nor was it debris from a Mogul Balloon train, which Marcel would easily have recognized.
Marcel Senior had been involved in balloon recoveries, and would never have confused balloon debris with exotic material. There was material that looked like tinfoil, but when crushed and released, returned to it’s original shape. (We are just learning to make such ‘memory materials.’) There were I-beams with ‘hieroglyphics’ on them that were as light as balsa wood but could not be bent or burned.
In that photo, taken by James Bond Johnson, General Ramey is holding a telegram. Image analysis has shown that it refers to ‘victims’ of the crash. Weather/Mogul balloon victims?
It was a disservice to PBS viewers to present long disproved material as factual and irrelevant pseudoscience about the videos taken by fighter pilots, the famous ‘TikTak’ and ‘Gimbel’ videos and others.
The program was essentially another tired old attempt to debunk the whole UFO phenomenon, attempts to explain the extraordinary as misinterpreted ordinary. We’re long past that.
Toward the end of the program, they repeated the old ‘They can’t get here from there’ mantra, because the universe is just so big. This reminds me of Lord Kelvin saying that heavier than air flying machines were impossible. Yes, they were — within the technological framework that Kelvin understood. Just because we can’t build faster than light (FTL) craft with our current technology does not mean that it is impossible. NASA is, in fact, exploring the possibilities of warp drive technology in Houston. A civilization even a hundred years in advance of ours probably has solved the problems of FTL travel, or might be using quantum teleportation to instantaneously jump from place to place in the universe. Physicists have already done quantum teleportation on a molecular level.
The argument that ‘they’ can’t get here is specious.
I have been researching the UFO phenomenon since the 1960s. In the early 1970s I wrote a regular column on the subject for Gnostica magazine. I have watched numerous feeble attempts to debunk the phenomenon over all of those years, but the UFOs ignored the nonsense and just kept doing their thing, and people worldwide kept seeing and encountering them.
It’s long past time to stop the silliness and admit that they are here, we don’t know what they are or where they’re from, and they’ve been here a very long time.
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About The Author: Bob Shell is a professional photographer, author, former editor in chief of Shutterbug Magazine and veteran contributor to this blog. He is currently serving a 35 year sentence for involuntary manslaughter for the death of Marion Franklin, one of his former models. He is serving the 17th year of his sentence at Pocahontas State Correctional Facility, Virginia.
On September 16, 2024 Shell’s release date got moved up six years due to new “mixed charges” law to February 2, 2030. It was 2036.
Yes, I admit it, I watch the History Channel’s ‘Ancient Aliens’ programs. Why? Because, even though they are about 60% horse hockey, they do slip in some interesting accurate facts.
But I strongly disagree with their basic premise, which is our ancient ancestors were too stupid to do this stuff, so either: A. They had the help of aliens; or B. The aliens did it. Our ancient ancestors were as intelligent as we are. They just understood things we don’t. They had a lost technology for moving very heavy things with little effort. What was this technology? We simply don’t know.
In Florida there is something called the Coral Castle. It is made of very large pieces of coral rock, pieces weighing tons. One stone, a revolving doorway weighing tons, is balanced so precisely that a child can turn it. I’ve been there and found it astonishing. All of the stones were moved and positioned by one man, working alone at night, with only a wooden tripod. There was a rectangular box mounted atop the tripod. We have no idea what was in it. The man who accomplished this amazing feat claimed he had rediscovered the technology the Egyptians used to build the pyramids. Whatever that secret was, he took it to the grave with him. He certainly did not claim alien assistance. All attempts to duplicate his feat have failed. I’m sure you can find photos and more info by Googling ‘Coral Castle.’ Around the world there are ancient megalithic structures. Megalith means ‘big stone,’ and the stone are big. Some are larger than city buses and weigh hundreds of tons. We’d be hard pressed to move them today with our most advanced machinery. I’m sure the ancient builders used big stones because it was easier for them than using lots of little stones, as later cultures had to do. But I don’t think aliens had anything to do with it.
Ancient humans, and by human I mean Homo sapiens, had brains just as large and developed as ours. Their culture and cultural references were just different. As was their technology. At a time when they supposedly only had tools made of stone or soft copper they created gigantic, polygonal stones, and fitted them together like three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles as though they weighed nothing. Since we find the same building style worldwide, I believe there was once a worldwide civilization that vanished at the end of the last Ice Age, about 12,500 years ago. There is considerable evidence that this Ice Age ended suddenly, causing worldwide flooding that is the root of flood myths in nearly all cultures. Graham Hancock has discussed this idea in his books.
Archeologists say the Giza pyramids and Great Sphinx are only about 3,000 to 5,000 years old. But geologists, who know more about rock weathering say they’re far older, dating to that same 12,500 years ago. I trust the geologists a lot more. This means that the ancient Egyptian civilization we know about did not build them. They were already there when that civilization arose. There is clear evidence that the face of the Great Sphinx was originally different, not the face of a pharaoh. That was changed later during dynastic times. Probably the original face wasn’t human at all, more likely a lion’s face.
Many of the programs in the ‘Ancient Aliens’ series are old, but they keep running them. Stan Friedman, my late friend, has been dead for years, but he still pops up there.
Because many of the programs are old, they don’t reflect the latest discoveries. For example, we now know that those famous cave paintings in France and Spain were painted by Neanderthals. They used their own saliva to mix with the pigments, and left their DNA behind. It’s Neanderthal DNA. The Neanderthals weren’t apelike subhumans. They had red hair and blue eyes. Dress one in a business suit and he wouldn’t attract any attention on Park Avenue. The slouching, bowlegged reconstruction that we saw for years came from a single old man discovered early who suffered severe osteoarthritis and other ailments.
Neanderthals had larger brains than modern humans and considerably larger eyes, so they may have been primarily nocturnal or crepuscular. Because there is no DNA in the megaliths, it is quite possible that Neanderthals were the builders. And Neanderthals are alive today in most of us. Unless your heritage is 100% sub-Saharan African, you carry Neanderthal genes. Apparently they never migrated south of the Sahara, which, to my mind, casts doubt on the ‘out of Africa’ theory of human evolution.
In the 1920s, when the great Roy Chapman Andrews led the American Museum of Natural History’s Central Asiatic Expeditions, the dominant theory was that humans originated in central Asia. Those expeditions were looking for ancient humans. Unfortunately, Andrews found that the rocks of the right age to contain fossils of early humans had weathered away, and he became famous for finding dinosaurs instead. I believe that the reason most early human fossils have been found in Africa is that the rock strata containing the fossils have weathered away everywhere else or are under dense tropical jungles and inaccessible. Fully modern humans lived worldwide millions of years ago, in my opinion.
I do not believe that the various Australopithecines found in Africa are human ancestors, just products of convergent evolution. Unfortunately, they’re far too old to extract DNA and set the record straight. Like gorillas and other apes, they are our distant cousins, not our ancestors. Fully modern human skulls have been found that are older than our supposed ancestors. See ‘Forbidden Archeology’ by Michael Cremo for details. More on this topic later.
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About The Author: Bob Shell is a professional photographer, author, former editor in chief of Shutterbug Magazine and veteran contributor to this blog. He is currently serving a 35 year sentence for involuntary manslaughter for the death of Marion Franklin, one of his former models. He is serving the 17th year of his sentence at Pocahontas State Correctional Facility, Virginia.
On September 16, 2024 Shell’s release date got moved up six years due to new “mixed charges” law to February 2, 2030. It was 2036.
Throughout history innovations have been resisted.
There is the possibly apocryphal story that one of the Egyptian pharaohs issued an edict banning steam powered chariots because the noise frightened the horses.
In verifiable history, in the late 1700s a Frenchman named Jacquard invented an automatic loom. Amazingly for its time, it used punchcards to control the mechanism. The automatic loom quickly supplanted weavers, because it could produce fabric far faster and cheaper. The weavers’ guilds objected. Many of the weavers broke into automated factories and threw their wooden shoes into the looms to shut them down. Those wooden shoes were called sabot, thus we get the word sabotage.
In the early 1900s there was resistance to automobiles, largely by carriage makers, buggy whip makers, draft horse breeders, etc. In England, under pressure from these groups, Parliament passed a law saying that any motorcar must be preceded on the road by a man waving a red flag. That law persisted until 1918, when it was finally realized how impractical it was.
In my own case, I was in the magazine business from the early 1980s. I watched the transitions as new technologies made former jobs redundant. Initially I wrote my articles on a typewriter and mailed them in to the magazine, where a typesetter retyped them on a device that wrote them onto the offset plates used to print the magazine. Photos to accompany my articles had to be made on film and the film had to be developed and printed, a laborious process.
I got my first computer in 1986. It was a Heathkit/Zenith that arrived in kit form. I was happily surprised when it worked after I assembled it. It had no hard drive, just ran on the old big floppy disks. The monitor had a black screen on which orange letters appeared as I typed. I wrote my first book on that computer. It worked for text, but could not handle images. My printer was a Kyocera dot matrix device that used long rolls of paper. I mailed my finished articles on floppy disks along with a hard copy and my photographs. Later, I upgraded to a Windows computer and bought a Nikon scanner to scan negatives and color slides. But I still sent my images in on physical media, floppies at first, later CDs.
I won’t go into more detail about the transition. I’ll only say that our typesetters lost their jobs, along with the repro camera operators, but new jobs were created operating the Mac computers used to lay out the magazines. Staff numbers went down, but only slightly, and the new jobs paid well. Of course, printed magazines have pretty much vanished today, gone on the Internet or out of business entirely. Since I don’t have Internet access, my choices of magazines has been severely limited, and those print magazines that survive are mostly priced out of my range. I subscribed to Rolling Stone since the 1960s, but when it jumped to sixty dollars a year I had to drop it. I used to get Professional Photographer, but that’s now only available to Professional Photographers of America members. I used to be a member, even wrote for the magazine, but membership would be useless to me now. I haven’t had a camera in my hands for seventeen years. I was reminded of these transitions by the dockworkers’ strike. One of their demands is protection from automation. They’re just like the weavers. Resisting the advance of technology is futile, it can’t be stopped. Rather than try to stop it we must adapt to it.
In the late 1990s, I’ve forgotten the exact year, on one of my trips to Japan, I toured a fully automated Canon camera factory. It was the size of a football field, but in the entire factory that churned out hundreds of cameras an hour there were only four humans. Dressed in white jumpsuits, they walked around with clipboards writing down readings from gauges.
Robot forklifts ran around the floors following yellow stripes on the floor picking up pallets of parts and carrying them to the big machines assembling the parts into cameras. The factory operated 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Robots don’t need coffee breaks, food, sleep, medical insurance, etc. That is the future. Human manual labor is disappearing, and the speed is advancing. Rather than trying to stop or slow it down, we humans must learn the present jobs automation cannot do or new jobs that technology is creating.
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About The Author: Bob Shell is a professional photographer, author, former editor in chief of Shutterbug Magazine and veteran contributor to this blog. He is currently serving a 35 year sentence for involuntary manslaughter for the death of Marion Franklin, one of his former models. He is serving the 17th year of his sentence at Pocahontas State Correctional Facility, Virginia.
On September 16, 2024 Shell’s release date got moved up six years due to new “mixed charges” law to February 2, 2030. It was 2036.
