The Photo Review is a critical journal of international scope and readership. Publishing since 1976, The Photo Review covers photography events throughout the country and serves as a central resource for the Mid-Atlantic region. With incisive reviews, exciting portfolios, lively interviews, the latest in books and exhibitions, The Photo Review biannual journal has earned a reputation as one of the best serious photography publications being produced today. Our writers — including A.D. Coleman, Stephen Perloff, Shelley Rice, Peter Hay Halpert, Barbara L. Michaels, Jean Dykstra, and Mark Power — have weighed in on subjects as varied as the posthumous publication of work by Diane Arbus, women in photography, the growth of digital media, the historical movement from Pictorialism into Modernism, etc., etc. In his ongoing series, “The Censorship Diaries,” Editor Stephen Perloff was in the forefront in covering the controversy over funding for the NEA and censorship of the arts.
The Photo Review has earned a reputation for lucid and incisive writing aimed at an intelligent and informed audience, but free of the cant and jargon that infects much contemporary writing about art. Thus, both arts publications and the popular press have looked to us for interpretations of what’s happening on the photography scene. Articles have been reprinted in such publications as Afterimage, To, Photography in New York, American Photo, and others.
Editor Stephen Perloff, a respected writer, educator and photographer, has been interviewed for The New York Times, The Toronto Globe & Mail, The Wall Street Journal, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Photo District News, and the New York Observer. He has received two critic’s fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Colin Ford Award for Curatorship from the Royal Photographic Society.
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Wasteland. Photo: Tony Ward, Copyright 2024. Available at Auction on October 26, 2024.
AI illustration of a UFO landing in a desert in California
Text by Bob Shell, Copyright 2024
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UFO Nonsense
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On Friday night, August 23, 2024 News Nation aired a one-hour special program about Lue Elizondo and repeated the program Sunday night. Elizondo is a former US intelligence officer who headed a top secret government program to study UAP, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, what everyone else calls UFOs.
In the program, Elizondo made numerous claims: UAP are real, the US government has retrieved some of them for study and reverse engineering, they’re abducting people and implanting ‘things’ in them, etc. This is all stuff students of UFOs have been studying for ages.
This may have been news to many people, but it was old hat to those of us who have actually studied the UFO phenomenon. I first started studying UFOs in the late 1960s (yeah, I’m old!). My first paid writing gig was writing a column on UFOs for Gnostica News, a new-age publication produced by Llewellyn in the early 1970s. It was edited by P. E. I. Bonewits, author of the book ‘Real Magic.’ He gave me free rein to write what I chose.
I’d inherited my interest in UFOs from my father, Jim Shell, a news anchor at WSLS TV in Roanoke, Virginia. He’d reported seriously on UFO phenomena in Virginia, particularly a UFO ‘flap’ in Wytheville, Virginia, that lasted for several years. After interviewing many eyewitnesses, he’d realized that something real and important was happening.
My interest in UFOs continued for years. While living in Washington, DC, and working for the Smithsonian Institution in the late 1960s I spent time hanging around the NICAP offices (National Investigions Committee on Aerial Phenomena ), studying some some of their files and their extensive library of books about UFOs and other paranormal phenomena. I met and talked with Don Keyhoe, the Director. It is a well-known fact that the CIA infiltrated and destroyed NICAP.
In the mid 1990s I researched the infamous Alien Autopsy film and coauthored the 1996 book ‘Beyond Roswell.’ (My name is not on the cover of the book due to contractual issues, but I am credited as coauthor inside the book. I was Editor in Chief of Shutterbug magazine at the time, the world’s largest circulation photography magazine, and was asked to keep my UFO activities sub rosa.) That book is still considered essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the UFO phenomenon and the Roswell event in 1947. My late friend Stan Friedman said it was the best book ever written about Roswell. It is out of print now, but still readily available on Amazon.
When the book came out I was interviewed by Art Bell on Coast To Coast AM (that interview can be found on the Internet), by Ollie North on his radio show, and was flown to Paris to appear on a two-hour TV special program on TF-1, the main French TV network. I was also a speaker at UFO conferences worldwide. So I know this subject inside-out.
My main criticism of the Elizondo program is that they didn’t do any research into the history of the phenomena they discussed. If they had, they would have known of the work of Dr. Roger Leir. In the 1990s Dr. Leir surgically removed many ‘alien implants’ from abductees. At least one was analyzed. It was metal, and the isotope ratios were not those of any metal found on Earth. It was absolutely extraterrestrial. Dr. Leir’s work and the book he wrote about it seems to have been forgotten. I knew Roger, and I believe he was an honest investigator studying a highly unusual phenomenon.
None of Elizondo’s revelations is anything new. My only criticism is that he and the people who produced the program about him didn’t do their homework. If they had, they’d have added some historical context. Lue Elizondo appears to be just what he claims to be, an insider who believes people have a right to know what’s going on behind the scenes of secret government programs that are breaking the law by not briefing Congress on what they are doing, and what they’ve discovered.
Angry Congressmen have demanded full disclosure, and have passed laws to force it. But, as Elizondo says, ‘religious fundamentalists’ within the Pentagon will do anything to block full disclosure. These paranoid idiots believe UFOs are made and controlled by demons.
Jacques Vallee and Graham Hancock have pretty firmly established that the UFO phenomenon goes back beyond written history and is behind much myth, legend, and folklore. Human encounters with these ‘aliens’ probably predate modern humans.
I had the honor of interviewing Col. Philip Corso not long before his death. Like Elizondo, his credentials were impeccable. He said that he was the man at the Pentagon entrusted with the Roswell debris, and his job was to turn it over, a little at a time, to US industries for reverse engineering. He wrote a book, ‘The Day After. Roswell,’ in which he divulged much, but he told me and other interviewers, “What crashed at Roswell was not a spaceship. It was a time machine.” Perhaps the ‘aliens’ are us from some distant future, or others from some disant past. One NASA scientist claims there is evidence of an ancient prehuman civilization.
Whatever the truth, we deserve to know it.
The Elizondo program was followed by a totally ridiculous program in which Dr. Michio Kaku showed his abysmal unfamiliarity with the subject and Seth Shostak, head of SETI, showed that he has his head firmly buried in the sand. His insistence that advanced alien civilizations would use radio to communicate is absurd. It’s like looking for smoke signals in outer space. As Arthur C. Clarke said, any advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic. With all due respect to Seth, I believe SETI is a waste of time and resources. The ‘aliens’ are already here.
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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 15th year of his sentence at Pocahontas State Correctional Facility, Virginia. To read additional articles by Bob Shell, click here: https://tonywardstudio.com/blog/bob-shell-nasas-nazis-and-alternative-physics/
A physicist friend who used to work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory recently sent me a truly amazing book. It’s titled ‘The Philosophers’ Stone: Alchemy and the Secret Research for Exotic Matter’ by Joseph P. Farrell.
The book gets off to a very slow start, and I almost put it aside and didn’t finish reading it, but on page 99 it really takes off and gets to it’s real meat close to the end.
Did you know that strands of DNA are superconductors at biological temperatures? From my background in biology I know that it’s been known for some time that nerve signals in animals move faster than can be accounted for by the standard models of chemical signalling across synaptic gaps, but no one had proposed a model to explain it, so the phenomenon was swept under the carpet and ignored.
Superconduction by DNA solves the question of this phenomenon neatly. Superconduction is the movement of electrical current at maximum speed with no resistance, no production of heat. Normal superconduction occurs only at very low temperatures, and the requirement to keep the systems at these very low temperatures has limited the practical use of superconductors.
I’d heard of the Nazi Glock (‘Bell’) device somewhere before, but knew nothing about it. Farrell has investigated it in depth. The Bell was a device with a nonconductive bell-shaped ceramic outer shell and two rotating drums inside. It was some two meters tall with a hook on top to allow it to be lifted and moved. The two drums contained small amounts of mercury. As the drums spun, the mercury spread out into a thin film on their inner surfaces. Whether the drums were concentric or one atop the other is unclear from available information. The drums rotated in opposite directions at very high speed. This created a field of some sort around the device that could be deadly to people who got too close. Dr. Huburtus Strughold, the doctor associated with the project tested it on concentration camp inmates to determine the effects on humans at various distances from the Bell. (Later he became NASA’s director of space medicine! NASA’s history is full of Nazis! From von Braun on down!)
The device lost weight, as well when the drums were spinning.
Ancient Indian texts describe vimenas, flying machines, using spinning rings of mercury to produce lift. Apparently the Nazi scientists were inspired by this. They were seeking new propulsion systems.
Toward the end of the book, Farrell goes into alternate theories of physics proposed by Pascual Jordan and Burkhart Heim, two neglected physicists who have been ignored by today’s physicists because they were committed Nazis.
In my 2019 book ‘Cosmic Dance’ I proposed quantum time. Jordan worked on quantization of spacetime! He was onto this in the 1940’s!! I though the idea was mine, sigh!
Jordan believed that the constants of physics were not fixed, as most physicists believed then, and still believe today. He theorized that those constants varied over time. He believed that the Earth’s gravity varied over time. This variation in gravity was, he believed, because the Earth’s mass had varied over time. He attributed this variation to torsion caused by the Earth’s rotation. I find this idea intriguing, because I proposed in ‘Cosmic Dance’ that the reason dinosaur footprints were all too shallow might be due to lower gravity back then. The animals weighed much less than they’d weigh today.
Heim developed the Unified Field Theory that Einstein was unable to develop, using only six dimensions, not the twenty or more demanded by string theory.
Heim lost his eyesight, arms, and most of his hearing as a result of one of his experiments in developing his theory. Undaunted by this, he continued working until his death many years later in 2001.
There is a well-known photograph of Adolf Hitler leaning over to study a map as he plans the invasion of France. In the photo with him is Hermann Goring and Baron Jesco von Puttkamer, Hitler’s personal Adjutant and representative of the Kreigsmarine, the German wartime navy.
What did Puttkamer do after the war? He worked for NASA in some unspecified job and was listed as a ‘consultant’ to Gene Roddenberry on Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation!
Anyway, I think you’d find this book as exciting and fascinating as I did.
Farrell refers to another book that I somehow missed in my UFO research: ‘UFOs and Anti-Gravity: Piece for a Jigsaw’ by Leonard Cramp. It was published in 1966 and reprinted in 1996 and goes into Heim’s research in detail. Now that I know about this book I’ll have to get a copy.
NASA was aware of all the Nazi research on antigravity and unusual methods of propulsion, and Paperclipped many of the Nazi scientists involved to work for them.
If the doors of US government secrecy are ever thrown open, some very nasty stuff will come out.
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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 15th year of his sentence at Pocahontas State Correctional Facility, Virginia. To read additional articles by Bob Shell, click here: https://tonywardstudio.com/blog/bob-shell-is-there-a-fifth-force-of-nature/
Particle accelerator illustration generated by A.I.
Text by Bob Shell, Copyright 2024
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Is There a ‘Fifth’ Force of Nature?
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For several weeks newsmedia have been reporting on the possible discovery of a ‘fifth’ force of nature. Scientists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, sent a muon around their fifty foot accelerator donut. Muons are elementary particles with negative charges like electrons, but are much more massive. The Standard Model of nuclear physics predicts they will behave in predictable ways. Most physicists accept the Standard Model.
When a muon is accelerated in a particle accelerator it spins like a top, and it wobbles. In more technical terms, it precesses. Think of it as like the Earth. Our planet ‘spins,’ rotates as it goes around in its orbit, and it wobbles. That wobble causes the well-known precession of the equinoxes. Similarly, the muon wobbles and precesses. Its precessions ought to be predicted by the Standard Model. Only when the Fermi scientists actually tested it in 2021, it didn’t precess as it should have. It deviated by a tiny fraction, but that tiny fraction’s implications were huge.
Because this upset the Standard Model’s applecart, they recently did the tests again with improved precision, and the damned little muon still refused to follow the Standard Model. This is big news in physics because it shows that the Standard Model is flawed, and, at least in this case, wrong. Perhaps the whole Standard Model is wrong.
This research could open the door to a new Standard Model which would radically reconfigure physics as a whole. Much work will have to be done to develop the new Standard Model.
The reason this is of particular interest to me hinges on the four accepted forces of nature, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force that holds atoms together, the weak nuclear force that allows radioactive decay, and gravity.
In a gedanken, a thought experiment as Einstein called them, I realized some years ago that this is dead wrong.
Gravity is not a force of nature at all. It is merely an emergent phenomenon.
An emergent phenomenon is simply a phenomenon we perceive that actually emerges from something else. A good example is heat. We perceive heat, but heat is merely an emergent phenomenon. Heat is actually molecular/atomic motion, although we do not perceive it as such. We perceive heat.
Similarly, we perceive gravity, but what it actually is, is the effect of mass on spacetime. We are pulled toward the earth, not by an elementary force, but simply because our feet are closer to the mass of the Earth than our heads. Our heads are accelerating through spacetime faster than our feet. Black holes have near infinite ‘gravitational attraction’ because movement through the time dimension of spacetime ceases at the event horizon of a black hole.
Saying that gravity is a fundamental force of nature is just wrong, and has always been wrong. Physicists speak of the difficulty of reconciling the ‘force’ of gravity with general relatively. There is nothing to reconcile. ‘Time dilation’ in proximity to mass is right there in front of their faces in general relatively, and has been experimentally verified. Clocks on the International Space Station run faster than identical clocks on Earth. (Somehow NASA got this backwards in one of their press releases!)
Einstein, riding in an elevator at the Swiss patent office where he worked, had the realization that gravity was nothing more than acceleration. But he didn’t carry that realization to its natural conclusion that gravity isn’t a force at all. I suppose he was too steeped in Newtonian physics to make the leap.
Readers of my 2019 book ‘COSMIC DANCE’ may recall that I wrote about this then. I plan to expand on this idea in the sequel I’m writing now.
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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 15th year of his sentence at Pocahontas State Correctional Facility, Virginia. To read additional articles by Bob Shell, click here: https://tonywardstudio.com/blog/bob-shell-cicadas/
The Assassination Attempt on Trump: A Wake-Up Call for the Secret Service
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The recent assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump has sent shockwaves across the nation, highlighting vulnerabilities within the Secret Service’s protective measures. As details unfold, this incident could mark a pivotal moment in the evolution of presidential security protocols.
The audacious attempt occurred during a public engagement, raising immediate questions about the adequacy of current security measures. Trump, known for his polarizing presence and large, fervent crowds, has always posed a unique challenge to the Secret Service. However, the attempt on his life has exposed critical gaps that must be addressed to ensure the safety of current and future leaders.
The Secret Service, an agency with a storied history of protecting America’s highest office, will now face intense scrutiny. Traditionally, their strategy has relied on a combination of physical barriers, advanced technology, and meticulous planning. Despite these measures, the attack on Trump demonstrates that no system is foolproof and that constant adaptation is necessary.
One significant area of concern is the balance between accessibility and security. Modern presidents, including Trump, thrive on direct engagement with the public. This openness, while politically advantageous, inherently increases risk. The Secret Service may need to reassess how to protect leaders without completely isolating them from their supporters. Innovative approaches, such as enhanced crowd monitoring and the use of artificial intelligence to identify threats in real-time, could become standard practice.
Another aspect under consideration is the training and readiness of Secret Service agents. The Trump assassination attempt has underscored the need for continuous, rigorous training programs that prepare agents for a wide array of scenarios. This includes not only physical threats but also cyber-attacks and other forms of modern terrorism. Emphasizing agility and rapid response will be crucial.
The psychological aspect of security is also paramount. Ensuring that agents remain vigilant and prepared for potential threats requires a supportive and well-structured work environment. This could mean increased mental health support and resilience training to help agents manage the stress of their roles effectively.
In the aftermath of this event, the Secret Service is likely to undergo significant reforms. These could include technological upgrades, revised protocols for public engagements, and enhanced training regimens. The goal will be to build a security apparatus that can preemptively identify and neutralize threats while adapting to the ever-changing landscape of potential dangers.
The assassination attempt on Trump serves as a stark reminder that the protection of the nation’s leaders is an evolving challenge. For the Secret Service, this incident is a catalyst for reflection and improvement, ensuring that future presidents are safeguarded against both known and emerging threats. As the agency undertakes these critical reforms, the safety of America’s highest office will remain a paramount priority, reinforcing the resilience and adaptability of this essential institution.
