Alternate Perceptions Magazine, March 2021
Did AMP Detect A Cold Plasma?
by: Mary Kerfoot
I found Greg Little's discussion of intelligent plasmas in the June, 2020 AP issue particularly interesting because I have encountered this phenomenon myself. In my case it was pink and I thrust my hand and lower arm into it.
What I believe to be a plasma encounter occurred during operation of the Ambient Monitoring Project (AMP). My house was a beta site for the "boom box" which was filled with various scientific instruments such as temperature and light sensors which collected ambient data at frequent, fixed intervals. This data was downloaded daily by Tom Deuley in his Texas home. I was given a log in which to record any unusual events, day and night. The ultimate goal was to determine whether changes in environmental variables may be correlated with alien visitations and to collect concrete evidence of this association.
Mark Rodeghier brought the boom box to my house and installed it in my bedroom on the dresser. I joked with Mark that the beings would not be fooled by the box and most likely were aware of what we were doing at that very moment. I told him, too, that I seemed to be in a lull as far as alien activity was concerned so didn't expect anything to happen. When I asked Mark what kind of data was being collected, he only mentioned light, temperature, and audio but would not discuss the full array of instrumentation. He did assure me that the boom box did not collect photographic data. I promised not to attempt to open the box or remove anything inside. The box was to remain in place for one month.
That night strange things began happening with the box. Just before going to bed, I heard Tom and his wife talking and it was coming from the box. That problem was corrected, apparently, because it never happened again. To my great surprise, however, alien activity picked up and continued frequently throughout the duration of the box's presence. I kept a detailed log of everything that happened along with the date and time of each occurrence. My encounter with a pink cloud was one of those events.
Unfortunately, I was not able to photocopy what I had written before Mark picked up the boom box and log so what I'm writing here is from memory which has faded a bit. I don't remember the exact month and year the experiment was conducted but guess it may have been in spring, 1999. The pink cloud encounter stands out for two reasons. First, the event was preceded by the presence of what appeared to be an alien craft in the sky which was witnessed by neighbors and me. Second, the boom box did detect the presence of the pink cloud. Mark and Tom discussed the statistical analysis of that event with me at the MUFON symposium the following July. They were quite excited about their findings.
Mark did the analysis and found a significant correlation between certain environmental variables (he didn't say which ones) and the presence of the cloud. They also said the pink cloud event was the only case at that point that showed a high correlation coefficient. They didn't mention what type of coefficient was used in the analysis or whether it implied a causal relationship between the change in one or more environmental variables and the presence of the cloud. Nine years later in the July, 2008 MUFON UFO Journal, Tom published an article entitled The Ambient Monitoring Project: Data Collected in Abductees’ Homes Being Analyzed. In the article he mentioned that the instrumentation in the boxes included an “array of electromagnetic sensors”.
Here's what I remember about the pink cloud encounter. There's not much to it. One night I heard a commotion coming from the neighbors across the street. I looked out my east bedroom window and saw they were screaming about a UFO and pointing at an object in the sky. It wasn't moving and didn't seem that interesting so I turned away to enter the incident in the AMP log. At that moment a pink, amorphous cloud floated through the window and into the room. The cloud seemed vaguely familiar and I wanted to touch it. When I extended my arm into the cloud, my hand and lower arm disappeared. Later, I entered the date, time, and description of the event in my log but remembered nothing after that. I have no memory of what became of the cloud; I simply fell asleep.
For years I thought the pink cloud might be a plasma although it didn't behave in the way I imagined a plasma would with high energy and burning effects. Greg's article on intelligent plasmas piqued my interest and motivated me to research the topic. I discovered that the amount of information on plasmas is really extensive because there are so many different types, characteristics, and applications. I am now convinced that my pink cloud was a plasma but not of the type Greg described. What I encountered is called a "cold plasma".
Here is what I’ve learned about plasmas generally and cold plasmas in particular. Plasma is the fourth state of matter, occurring in phase transitions from solid to liquid to gas to plasma. Plasma is an ionized gas consisting of charged particles. It is created when energy is injected into a gas, causing the gas to become ionized. Energizing the gas pulls electrons away from their nuclei, producing a mix of free electrons and positively-charged nuclei called ions. Free electrons travel with their nuclei even though they are not physically bonded to them.
Neutral plasmas are the most common form of plasmas. They are created from a neutral gas such as hydrogen in which the number of electrons equals the number of protons, making the charge of the gas zero. Plasmas made from neutral gases are also neutral overall because they are comprised of an equal number of protons and electrons. However, a plasma is not neutral at the local, atomic, level since ionization causes some or all of its atoms to break apart into free electrons and positively-charged ions.
Plasmas are produced naturally from atmospheric flames or sparks and from the sun’s electromagnetic radiation. Stars, lightning, and auroras are examples of naturally-occurring plasmas. It is believed that most of the visible universe is comprised of plasma.
Artificial plasmas are usually created by subjecting a gas to heat, electricity, strong electromagnetic fields, or light from a laser. These plasmas are used in plasma televisions, welding torches, plasma scalpels, florescent lights, neon signs, and in the manufacture of computer hardware and cell phones.
As more electrons are stripped from their nuclei, the plasma becomes more ionized, energetic, and hotter. In some cases, almost all of the electrons may be stripped away, creating ultrahigh-energy, maximum-density plasmas. Plasma density is generally defined as the percent of free electrons per volume of ionized gas. These types of plasmas can attain temperatures exceeding 500,000,000 degrees FGehrenheit – hotter than the sun! There is no material that can contain them so they are held in place by magnetic fields. These plasmas are used in nuclear fusion power-generating facilities.
There are currently more than 200 experimental nuclear fusion sites throughout the world. Most use a machine called a tokamak developed by Soviet scientists in the late 1960s. Like conventional power-generating facilities, the tokamak relies on fuel to create a chain of events where water is heated to produce steam to drive turbines to generate electricity. Instead of coal, natural gas, nuclear fission, or hydroelectricity and other renewables, the tokamak utilizes hydrogen gas which is introduced into a donut-shaped vacuum chamber.
Hydrogen in the vessel is subjected to extreme heat and pressure and a powerful electric current which ionize the gas to form a plasma. Extremely high plasma densities and plasma temperatures exceeding 300,000,000 degrees Fehrenheit accelerate the positively-charged nuclei to velocities sufficient to overcome their mutual repulsive forces. This causes the nuclei to collide and fuse, creating the heavier element helium. Tremendous amounts of energy are released which is absorbed as heat in the walls of the vessel.
Massive magnetic coils around the outside of the vessel stabilize the plasma and confine it so it doesn’t expand to the vessel walls where it would quickly cool and dissipate. Heat in the walls is eventually converted into electricity. A new generation of tokamak has been designed in a project called ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) in which fusion byproducts are recovered and reintroduced back into the vacuum chamber to prolong the fusion process and come closer to achieving the goal of a self-sustaining reaction. This will be the first tokamak to produce net energy gain by generating 500 megawatts of fusion power from 50 megawatts of input heating power.
Problems still remain with plasma confinement, however. Applying the magnetic coils in a double helix-type formation has minimized plasma leakage but the issue of vessel walls being pitted and degraded by neutrons released during fusion still persists. Despite these issues, the potential for clean, safe power has encouraged ITER and other plasma technologies to push ahead with research and development. Construction has already begun on the huge ITER complex in southern France.
Depending on the degree of energy and density, plasmas may be categorized as hot, warm, cold, and ultracold. They have no definite shape or volume and all have extremely high electrical conductivity. Because they can be manipulated and shaped by long-range electromagnetic fields, plasmas have found extensive use in military applications. Plasmas have their own electric and magnetic fields and produce their own electromagnetic radiation. Plasmas are not self-sustaining. They require a continual input of energy to prevent the particles from recombining into their original gas state.
Because of their low densities, auroras are naturally-occurring cold plasmas. Artificially-created cold plasmas have temperatures ranging from about 80 degrees fahrenheit to 440 degrees fahrenheit. They can be produced with a low degree of ionization where relatively few electrons are stripped from their nuclei.
Cold plasmas are used in medical technology for sterilization by killing bacteria and inactivating human, animal, and plant viruses. These plasmas are used to promote wound-healing and to kill tumors and cancer cells without damaging surrounding tissue. After a cancer is surgically removed and followed up with chemotherapy and/or radiation, cold plasma may be employed to kill residual cancer cells. Plasma pens extrude a thin plume of plasma which can be applied over the treated area. These pens are also used in non-invasive cosmetic surgery to lift and tighten skin. Tooth whitening and disinfection is another common use of cold plasma.
Ultracold plasmas are created artificially with temperatures near absolute zero. The physics department at the University of Maryland is one of several locations producing and researching ultracold plasmas. They have published a synopsis of their work on the physics.umd.edu website in which they state:
We use ultracold atoms created with laser-cooling techniques and pulsed lasers to create the coldest neutral plasmas ever made, with temperatures as low as ~1K. They tend to last for less than one millisecond, blown apart by the pressure of the electrons and the recombination of electrons and ions into highly excited (Rydberg) atoms. We are currently studying properties of these ultracold plasmas, including collective modes, plasma instabilities, Rydberg atom production, and magnetic field effects.
My pink cloud exhibited many of the properties of a weakly-ionized cold plasma. It had no defined shape. It was simply an amorphous, spread-out, 2’x3’ dimensional entity which passed through the window with ease. The temperature of the cloud was approximately that of my bedroom. The cloud did not burn or injure my skin in any way. It offered no resistance to the insertion of my hand and arm. Its pink color was consistent with that of a plasma created by ionizing hydrogen gas.
Plasmas exhibit a variety of colors depending on the gas that is used to produce them. The colors range from blue, green, pink, yellow, violet, to dark red – some of the same colors you’d see in an aurora. It may have been the electromagnetic properties of the plasma in my bedroom which were detected by AMP instrumentation. The disappearance of my hand and lower arm in the plasma suggests a possible connection between electromagnetic radiation and invisibility.
Greg’s article has a lot of fascinating information about plasmas – how they can affect brain chemistry and display an intelligence of their own. They may even represent an alternative form of sentient life. Hoping to find more detailed information on these topics, I searched online but was not very successful. I wasn’t able to access Greg’s introduction to Andrew Collins’ book LightQuest and only found the same information he had previously written in earlier AP issues. Therefore, I decided to try a more general search and did find more on these topics by other authors.
The closest I came to references on plasma intelligence was in the work of theoretical physicist David Bohm. His research in the early1940s at the University of California, Berkeley revealed some interesting properties of free electrons in the plasmas he studied. He found that beneath the seemingly chaotic movement of individual electrons there was a highly organized and cooperative behavior which contributed to the overall organization of the plasma. The electrons were a cooperative part of an interconnected whole. Bohm felt that these electrons were in some sense alive.
Later Bohm extended his research to the interaction of electrons in metals. Again, he found an organized and cooperative behavior which eventually came to be known as plasma oscillation. Bohm made the comment that even the electron is informed with a certain level of mind.
In an interview with the American Institute of Physics in 1981, Bohm had this to say about his research with plasmas in the 1940s:
… I could see the plasma as an interesting thing. First of all, it was a sort of an autonomous medium; it determined its own conditions, it had its own movements, which were self-determined, and it had the effect that you had collective movement, but all the individuals would contribute to the collective and at the same time have their own autonomy.
If Bohm’s interpretation of plasma behavior sounds a bit like socialist thought, that’s because he and other students were involved in some fairly radical movements, such as the Young Communist League, while studying plasmas at Berkeley. Bohm’s description of plasma behavior supports Greg’s hypothesis that the way we interpret the phenomenological world is based on our personal history and belief systems.
Cooperative behavior of electrons may contribute to a plasma’s overall organization because free electrons have not fully severed their relationships with respective nuclei. They are not physically bonded, yet they travel with their nuclei and can readily recombine if energy is not sufficient to sustain ionization. This resembles the modern concept of marital separation where a couple is separated but living under the same roof.
Bohm’s observation that electrons in a plasma seemed to be alive prompted me to reflect on the meaning of being alive. There’s an interesting corollary here with viruses. I read recently that viruses are not considered to be alive and, therefore, cannot be killed. To double-check on this, I consulted a Scientific American article entitled Are Viruses Alive? (August 8, 2008) which detailed the evolution of thought on the status of viral life. Over the past 100 years, the definition of a virus has evolved from its initial categorization as a poison, then to that of a life-form, then to a collection of biological chemicals, and now to something existing between life and non-life.
A stunning demonstration of Bohm’s theory of collective movement was witnessed by a friend living in Hong Kong in the early 1970s. One morning she glanced at the floor and was surprised to see what appeared to be oil flowing from under a closed closet door. She looked more closely and realized it was not oil flowing out of the closet, rather a swarm of baby cockroaches. Their individual movements were so precisely synchronized that they appeared to be a single, flowing entity.
It seems likely that the pink cloud I encountered was a cold plasma but the question remains how and why it ended up in my bedroom. I assume that the object in the sky was associated with the cloud, perhaps directing or manipulating it, and wonder if it, too, may have been some form of plasma. If not, was it an extraterrestrial craft or a craft comprised of plasma? A wide assortment of extraterrestrial ships have been reported in sightings and by encounter experiencers. They don't have to be the classic, metal discs of Kenneth Arnold days.
For example, a number of experiencers have claimed that the craft they were in was a living, breathing, conscious organism. Others have described these craft as cloud-like. Some have reported a multi-faceted, diamond-shaped craft that appeared to be crystal clear. My friend Edward Carlos witnessed a flaming circle of light which resembled the Merkavah of Kabbalistic tradition. Inside the craft he observed a cluster of tall crystals in the center of a room, each with different heights and hollow inside. The tops of the crystals were open and slanted in different directions.
Six years before the pink cloud incident, I interacted with an amorphous, black hole-type craft that had zero vibrational energy. It looked and felt like an absence of light – the diametric opposite of an energized plasma. I stepped inside and momentarily lost consciousness as the dark beast transitioned from utter stillness to a vibrant, well-lit entity, bustling with activity.
I believe some craft are portals, or create portals, to other dimensions. Years ago I came across a particular crash-retrieval case where an investigator entered a crashed, 50’ disc in which the interior seemed limitless. He noticed a spinning device and wondered if it could be creating a spatial distortion inside the ship. When the machine shut off, the interior of the craft contracted to a size commensurate with its external dimensions. Could electromagnetic fields generated by the device have created an alternate dimension inside the ship?
I have not been able to find the original documentation of the case and don’t remember who researched it. I thought it might have been Len Stringfield but haven’t found it in his status reports yet. I am trying to build a case for the connection between electromagnetic fields and warping of spacetime so information any of you may have relating to a case like this would be very helpful. You could pass this information along to Brent.
Experiencers have also reported being inside ships which appear to be vastly larger inside than out. A parallel situation exists where many beings emerge from a craft that seems too small to accommodate even one.
Here are some of the sources I’ve used in my explanation of plasmas and their applications, including David Bohm’s role in plasma research:
Scientific American
ITER.org
IEEE Spectrum “5 Big Ideas for Making Fusion Power a Reality”
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Physics Division
Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, jlab.org
American Institute of Physics Oral Histories, David Bohm interviewed by Lillian Hoddeson
David Peat, fdavidpeat.com/interviews/bohm
Kayla Wiles, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
plasma-universe.com
sciencelearn.org
livescience.com
Wikipedia
