The 65th UFO Festival in Roswell

 The UFO 1947 crash site

Like every year, the City of Roswell invites UFO enthusiasts and skeptics alike to join in the celebration of one of the most debated incidents in history. The three-day event will feature guest speakers, authors, an alien costume contest, an alien pet costume contest, an alien parade, and more. All that in a New Mexican heat of 1o6 °F. 

The Roswell UFO Museum

65 years ago a UFO crashed on a ranch 30 miles north of Roswell. This event stirred a never ending controversy and gave birth to countless conspiracy theories. 

 Visitor friendly alien on Main Street

Interestingly enough, the Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) issued a statement claiming to have recovered a crashed "flying disk."  But after the Roswell Daily Record published a front page article about the event, RAAF changed its statement the next day and announced that the object was a mere  weather balloon and not a flying disk as  previously reported. This revised statement sparked immediate controversy. The eye witnesses were hushed up or simply ridiculed. 

 The alien costume contest

To this day many people around the world believe that there was a cover upon a grand scale.

Winners in the kids' category

And while we may never learn the truth, we can at least have some fun. The festival lasts three days from June 29 till July 1. 

The coolest bartender ever!

The Roswell UFO Museum organized a number of talks. One of the more interesting is probably one that will be given on Sunday by Freddy Silva - a serious researcher of the crop circle phenomenon. You will also have a chance to meet a nuclear researcher Stanton Friedman, scientific UFOlogist Kathleen Marden, and Kevin Randle who studied UFOs for forty years, among others. To find out more simply visit UFO Museum site.

 Welcome to the Zone

Wishing all Roswell visitors and citizens alike a great fun. Get abducted! - Dominique Teng

A local brew. Worth taking home on this planet or elsewhere...

Life Is But a Dream

An elderly Zen Master, feeling that his time would soon come, devised a clever strategy to help his chief disciple achieve Great Awakening. He decided to drive the younger monk out of his complacency through an elaborate plan to "frame" him as a thief in disguise.

In the middle of the night, the Zen master would hide one of his valuable Buddha images and then cry "Thief, thief." The younger monks would all rush in, but there was no thief to be seen. Finally, after the third time, as the chief disciple ran into his room, the old master grabbed him and threw him on the floor, "Here is the thief. At last I have caught you red-handed!" The chief disciple was then denounced to one and all throughout the land.

The accused monk, once a teacher of a huge congregation, now completely disgraced and with nowhere to turn, his ego totally shattered, mulled over this flagrant injustice and at times even contemplated suicide. After several weeks of utter desperation, he suddenly experienced a Great Awakening: life is a dream, an illusion, a bubble, a shadow. This is the very teaching he had been trying to impart to the novices for so many years! He then rushed back to the Master, who upon seeing him, stood up, greeted him warmly and conferred the succession upon him.

Source of the article unknown but greatly appreciated

 

Image: Light into darkness by Dominique Allmon©2012

Celestial Realm

 Eighteen Disciples of Buddha by Wang Wusheng, 1984

"Dogen, one of Japan’s foremost medieval Zen masters, wrote in the "Sansui-kyo" chapter of the "Shobogenzo" that “to view sansui (Chinese style mountain-water landscape painting), is to meet yourself before you were born.”

The self before birth is a self beyond time and space. Dogen, wrote that this self is a ‘formless self’ no one has ever seen. This yet unformed self is the essence of sansui. A depiction of something beyond time and space whose appearance is yet unformed.

A dark mass of mountains is not dead space but the very soul of the living mountains. The white sky in his photographs is not an empty sky  but a sky shown after the passing of a raging storm, now bathed in sunlight."  - Seigo Matsuoka in "Photographic Sansui"

Wang Wusheng was born in 1945 in the city of Wuhu in Anhui Province, China. He graduated from Anhui University's School of Physics. Beginning in 1973, Wusheng worked as a photographer for a news magazine in Anhui Province. He studied at the Art Institute of Nihon University in Japan beginning in 1983 and studied for three years at the Tokyo Arts University. Wusheng currently works as a fine art photographer in Tokyo. 

Peaks and Clouds, by Wang Wusheng, 2004

For more than three decades, Wang Wusheng has been captivated by the beauty of Mount Huangshan, also called Yellow Mountain. Located in the southern part of the Anhui province in northern China, Mount Huangshan has often been described as the world's most beautiful and enchanting mountain. Over many centuries, this mountain, with its seventy-two peaks, has been the subject of Chinese landscape painters, whose singular works are so haunting make it appear impossible for these mountains to exist in nature. Inspired by the legacy of these paintings, Wusheng has sought to portray Mount Huangshan in his own way, expressing his "inner worlds" through this scenic wonder.

Wusheng captures mist-shrouded granite peaks emerging from an ever-changing veil of clouds, sculptural craggy rocks on lofty cliffs and weathered, oddly shaped pine trees. He records the appearance of Mount Huangshan in all seasons and at various times of day. As one critic says, "Wang's pictures are gorgeous, but their beauty does not come directly from the natural scenery. Rather, the mountain's natural wonders have been transformed into artistic spectacles through the artist's commitment to the medium of black-and-white photography, his insistent pursuit of dynamic movement and metamorphic images, and his deep emotional engagement with his subject. His mountain peaks are often densely dark -a kind of velvet darkness that seems full of color."

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