This is the busy month of the year for all of us in the paranormal. Halloween at the end of October turns attention to ghosts, haunting and everything spooky. I will be on the road for much of October, giving campus lectures and conference presentations and doing booksignings. This month’s featurette, Vampire UFOs, combines two favorite topics that have been making recent headlines in news and entertainment.

SEPTEMBER HIGHLIGHTS
September passed in a whirlwind with Dragon*Con in Atlanta and several appearances in West Virginia. John Zaffis, Fiona Broome and I helped to kick off the new Paranormal Track with talks on demons, Djinn and research trends. I also weighed in on Aleister Crowley on the Dark Fantasy track.

After the Haunted West Virginia Paranormal Conference in Parkersburg, I participated in the investigations at The Anchorage in Marietta. There I joined Susan Sheppard and Virginia Lyons to witness their table-tilting séance. The table did quite a bit of jumping, especially when the Djinn came through!

During the Mothman Festival in Pt. Pleasant, WV, I did some skywatching on Keel Hill, where John Keel saw UFOs during the 1966-67 wave (alas, we only saw satellites and meteors!), and did some research on my interdimensional portals projects.

VAMPIRES!
Join me, Dave Jones and John Zaffis for two hours on vampires Sunday October 3, 8-10 PM Eastern, on Para-X Radio, www.para-x.com. Dave is bringing on some sanguinarians – real blood drinkers – too!

THE LOST TAPES
The Animal Planet’s popular show, The Lost Tapes, has returned this fall with Season 3, and I am pleased to be back with it as well, appearing in three episodes:

Poltergeists — October 5 10:30 PM EST
The Beast of Bray Road — November 2 10:00 PM EST
Reptilians — November 9 10:00 PM EST

The Lost Tapes presents a fictional drama of people’s encounters with mysterious creatures. Expert interviews are interspersed to explain the mythology, folklore and sightings in real life.

DJINN UPDATE
Djinn continue to be a hot topic in the paranormal. Even fictional paranormal TV shows and “reality” shows have featured Djinn in recent weeks, not to mention films in theaters. This topic is going to get even bigger. That’s good, because we need to know more about the Djinn and their role in paranormal experiences. I have a Djinn page on my website, www.visionaryliving.com, which I will expand with the publication of The Vengeful Djinn, a book I have co-authored with Philip J. Imbrogno, due out in March next year.

Any time a topic gets to be hot, we are inundated with claims and information. We will hear from a lot of experts, some of them good and some of them dubious. Few people in the Western paranormal community have paid much attention to the Djinn, if they even knew about them in the first place.

Be wary of people (mostly “demonologists”) who say they’ve been “handling Djinn cases” for years. While that could be so, I find very little comprehension of the Djinn even now, let alone in the past. Usually when I mention the word Djinn to paranormal investigators, the response is, “What’s that?” Phil and I have been on the radio quite a bit in the past year talking about the Djinn, and we are raising awareness. There are other sources, too.

As for myself, I became interested in the Djinn in the course of my research for my encyclopedias, beginning in the late 1980s. I became seriously interested in them a few years ago, in part as an outgrowth of my research of Shadow People. In 2008, I started reevaluating many of my paranormal investigation cases from the standpoint of Djinn. That, and my collaboration with Phil, led to the book. We don’t claim to have all the answers by any means, but we have put together quite a portrait of these enigmatic entities.

I hope you check out the Djinn page, and also The Vengeful Djinn in March. Meanwhile, another excellent place to go is the Jinn forum on Yahoo Groups, run by Robert Lebling, an American who works in the Middle East and who has studied the Djinn for a very long time. Visit Jinn@yahoogroups.com.

OCTOBER PUBLIC APPEARANCES
See my calendar at www.visionaryliving.com/calendar for details.

October 10-11: Booksigning at Omen in Salem, MA for the Festival of the Dead, 11 AM-5 PM

October 10: “Ghosts and Hauntings” presentation at Omen (see above), with photos, videos and EVP, 7-9 PM

October 23: Booksigning for Ghosthunting Pennsylvania, Joseph-Beth Booksellers, Pittsburgh, 1 AM – 1 PM

October 31: Halloween Witches’ Ritual for the Dead, Salem Common, Salem, MA 5-7 PM

CAMPUS GHOST/VAMPIRES LECTURES AND GHOST HUNTS
October 8 – University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL
October 19 – Baltimore Community College, Dundalk, MD
October 22 – Washington & Jefferson University, Washington, PA
October 25 – SUNY, New Paltz, NY
October 26 – Drake University, Des Moines, IA
October 28 – Dickinson University, Dickinson, ND
October 29 – University of Missouri, Columbia, MO
October 30 – University of Vermont, Burlington, VT

FEATURE ARTICLE
[The article may be reposted provided the byline, copyright information and website link are included. Thank you for your courtesy.]

Vampire UFOs
By Rosemary Ellen Guiley
Copyright Visionary Living, Inc.
www.visionaryliving.com

They are not your usual UFOs, mysterious lights moving about the sky. They are vampires in the sky — killer UFOs that shoot deadly beams of red light. People who get hit by the red beams sicken and sometimes die, of bizarre wasting conditions. It may sound straight out of a B grade sci fi movie, but it’s all too real for the victims.

Lethal UFO attacks have been reported for decades. In 1946, a man in Brazil was struck by a UFO beam of light while returning from a fishing trip. His flesh began to fall off his bones, and he died six hours later. His body rapidly decomposed. In 1954, UFO beams reportedly burned to death an entire village and their livestock in Nairobi, Africa one night. In 1969, a man near Anolaima, Colombia was irradiated by a UFO. He became seriously ill and blue spots appeared all over his skin. He died within a few days.

In South America, the vampire UFOs are called chupa-chupas, named after the goat bloodsucker entity called the chupacabra. From July 1977 to November 1978, a wave of deadly UFOs around Colares, Brazil killed people and at least one animal — a dog — and left others seriously ill. In all, about 40 people, most of them adults, received medical treatment for injuries.

Most of the victims were struck by mysterious beams of red light that severely burned their chests. Blood tests showed the victims to have abnormally low levels of hemoglobin. Some of the victims did not die directly from the burns, but suffered a wasting away over a period of months, and then died. Many people in the area believed that the ETs in the UFOs had come specifically to suck the blood or energy from people.

In his book Confrontations, Jacques Vallee documents cases of chupa-chupas that affected three towns in Brazil in the early 1980s: Parnama, Sao Luis and Belem. The bodies of some of the victims looked as though they had had the blood sucked out of them. The victims were either out hunting and fishing at night, or sleeping in hammocks at home. The ones who were attacked while sleeping reported that they awakened to feel hit by a heavy weight on their chest that immobilized them. Bob Pratt documented additional cases in UFO Danger Zone.

Chupa victims who have survived suffer chronic physical complaints of weakness, dizziness and headaches. Some suffer mentally with fear and paranoia.

Vampire UFO attacks remain a mystery. If there are ETS who wish to attack humans, why so few and selected hits? Are they a bizarre experiment? Or are they a modern version of the blood-sucking vampire of Earth folklore? So far, there are no answers.
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