Alternate Perceptions Magazine, December 2024
UFO VISIONS
Massimo Teodorani’s Story
by: Mike Fiorito
I met Massimo Teodorani through a series of shared Facebook connections. Some of these relationships spawned from my writing for the Psychedelic Press, a publisher based in the UK through which I’ve gotten to know many people in the UK and around the world. Although Massimo and I had been “friends” on Facebook, I read about Massimo’s UFO data work in Ryan Sprague’s book, Somewhere in the Skies.
From what I’d read about him, I knew that Massimo is a scientist, with a degree in astronomy and a PhD in stellar physics from the University of Bologna. From his website, I learned that Massimo had published several informative articles on quantum physics, atomic and nuclear physics, astronomy, astrophysics, bioastronomy, the physics of anomalous atmospheric phenomena, human consciousness, and aerospace subjects. He’s also a musician.
A few weeks after I did the deep dive into his website, Massimo posted a link to an original electronic piece he had composed called “DMT Shining,” which I loved. It was like the phone was ringing, Massimo was calling me, and I had to answer. Like picking up signals from a distant star or UFO.
Massimo’s compositional style was influenced by the Berlin School of classical electronic music, an offshoot of Krautrock, which is often described as “spacey,” “dreamy,” or “psychedelic.” Some of the pioneering Berlin school musicians had their musical roots in ’60s psychedelic rock. Massimo uses the pseudonym Totemtag to publish his electronic music.
There were too many roads leading me to Massimo. I had to reach out to him and ask him if he would talk about how the UFO Phenomena relates to his music. We arranged to meet on a video call.
It was early December 2023. Sitting at his desk, wearing a knitted sweater, Massimo looked like Umberto Eco. His perfect English made it unnecessary for me to stumble through my poor Italian. However, he wasn’t familiar with the non-standard Neapolitan dialect I heard growing up. In Italy, the north and the south are like two different countries. “In Bologna, we have our own dialect too,” he admitted.
As we spoke, I scanned the wall behind him. I couldn’t help but ask Massimo about the photos above his desk. “This is called the Witch’s Nebula because it looks like a witch. And this one,” he said, pointing to the other photo, “is called the Pillar of Creation. These are from the Space Telescope. Today you can get much better pictures from the Webb Telescope.”
The Pillar of Creation shows stars forming within dense clouds of gas and dust. The three-dimensional pillars look like majestic rock formations but are far more permeable. “And what about those dolls to your right?” I asked, referring to the fifteen or so twelve-inch dolls, sitting on the shelf next to him. “Those are from my wife Susan’s collection. She also makes dolls as well.” Susan Demeter is a scholar, author, artist, and witch. Laughing, he added, “Some of the folks from the Galileo Project asked about these dolls, wondering about what kind of science I do.”
As a researcher at the Astronomical Observatories of Bologna and Naples, and later at the INAF Radio Telescope of Medicina, Massimo has been involved in research on many types of explosive stellar phenomena such as supernovae, novae, eruptive protostars and high-mass close binary stars—and, more recently, in the search for extrasolar planets and extraterrestrial intelligence within the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Project.
“Could you tell me a little bit about the work you did at the Naples Observatory in Italy?” I asked.
“That was two years after I got my PhD from Bologna University. The university wanted to send me to Russia to the Caucasus Observatory, but in 1992 Russia was collapsing. It was absolute chaos. There was no possibility for me to come back, even at Christmas, so I decided not to go to Russia. Then I learned of the option to go to the South of Italy. I also had a friend who was working there from North Italy. I wound up staying in Naples for about three to four years. I was working in the beginning on specific kinds of stars, called protostars. It’s the very beginning of the birth of a star. They are infants. They’re like small babies that are only about 50,000 years old. They do everything: they vomit, they shout, they scream. Children do the same things. They explode all the time because they are not yet stabilized.
“I was studying the way in which their dynamics develop in several wavelengths: optical, infrared, ultraviolet and radio. I used the International Ultraviolet Explorer (IUE) space telescope. I had been using a lot of telescopes and also making some interpretative physics based on shockwaves. For my master thesis I worked on the dynamics of supernova explosions and the fact that they create shockwaves in the interstellar environment. I studied the Alamogordo experiment at Trinity and all the calculations that were done to determine the effect of a shockwave on the environment. I scaled up all this on the supernova situation. Then I brought this knowledge to my PhD thesis about close binary stars,” said Massimo. “Then I became involved in the Hessdalen project in Norway,” he continued.
The Hessdalen lights are of unknown origin. They appear both by day and by night and seem to float through and above the valley.
They are usually bright white, yellow, or red and can appear above and below the horizon. The duration of the phenomenon may be a few seconds to well over an hour. Sometimes the lights move with enormous speed; at other times they seem to sway slowly back and forth. Yet, on other occasions, they hover in mid-air.
“I was brought on to take physics measurements of all the strange light phenomena that are seen very often in the Hessdalen valley of Central Norway. I was planning research and after that I met the people there and I went back several times to do research and I got some measurements mostly in the optical and sometimes also in the long wavelength. I have published many papers, some of which were peer reviewed in serious journals. At the present time (2023), I am deeply involved in a new research phase of Project Hessdalen, of which I am the main scientific advisor and science planner. My life has been working in parallel between studying these Phenomena, astrophysics and also electronic music. Since I obtained my master’s degree, I have been collecting synthesizers here and there.”
“Did the idea of the UFO, or other aspects of the Phenomena inspire you to start writing music? For you, is there a relationship as to how and why you compose and perform music and the Phenomena?” I asked, curious to hear Massimo’s response. The Phenomena includes mystical visions, telepathy, precognition, bilocation (being in two places at once), time travel, synchronicity, psychedelic experiences, dreams, near death experiences, visits from the beyond, visits from nonhuman intelligences, and more. The scope of the Phenomena is beyond the range of human knowledge and comprehension.
“It has happened in both ways: some musical soundscapes that I create seem to have triggered themselves from some ‘UFO visions.’ Conversely, some of my pieces have been indeed inspired by some of my previous hypnagogic visions and by some real sightings. Correspondence with the Other has been wholly one-toone,” said Massimo.
“You’ve said to me that you have visions of UFOs on the screen of your mind through music, have you had a UFO experience in normal waking life?”
“Yes, I have. I cannot deny this. Especially when doing my missions in Norway. Most of the time they were just light balls similar to lighted orbs that are moving and blinking, very spectacular. But twice, maybe three times, we saw something structured in the sky. In August 2000, there were five of us, two scientists in one place and three other scientists who were about two kilometers [0.6211 miles] away. It was a triangular thing that we saw, with three lights at the vertices. It came over us, literally. It was a machine, no doubt. But I don’t know. I cannot say if it was alien or manmade. Or Skunk Works [a project developed by a relatively small and loosely structured group of people who research and develop a project, often with a very large degree of autonomy, primarily for the sake of radical innovation]. But it was a machine. I could see it very well because I could see the fuselage. There was some residual light due to the aurora borealis. And in summer there is quite a lot of light during the night so I could see quite well. I aimed a laser I had in my backpack, and I pushed the laser, signaling to the thing overhead, asking it to land. But nothing happened and these three lights very gradually turned off. It literally disappeared over our heads!”
“Did it have exhaust or a trail?” I asked.
“No exhaust, no trail, no noise, nothing like that. And three or four days later, I was with my colleague and his wife and suddenly there was a little light. In this case, it was like a giant firefly elliptical object. I know the dimensions because the day after I went there and calculated them: it was about three feet wide in diameter. It arrived, floated over our head and then stopped about 200 feet away from us, close to a fir tree at the height of a man, six feet high or something like that, and it stayed there for ten minutes. My colleague was scared to death. I tried to approach the object, getting about one hundred feet near it, with a camera and tripod, wanting to identify the spectrum of the phenomenon, but there was no time to put the spectrographic filter on the camera. I was only able to take a photo of this giant firefly that stayed there for a long time.
“In addition to the spectacular sights witnessed in Norway I had a closer-to-home, synchronic mind experience. I was at my countryside house, lying on top of my car, smoking a cigarette. Thinking of nothing. My mind was empty. All of a sudden, something told me: Look here—and I looked in the sky and I saw a star-like light that suddenly started to move erratically in a random way, just like a firefly.
“This thing happened three or four times. Always from my countryside house and it was beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. I also had an experience during my childhood, but it’s nebulous and I am not clear. Something happened, I just don’t remember what.”
“Do you have UFO dreams?” I asked, having had many myself.
“Yes, I’ve had them many times. However, in the last fifteen years I almost never dream about UFOs. I dream about things like other dimensions. Like I am in my city, but it is completely different from waking life reality. It’s like a version of my city in that dimensional realm.”
“I read in Ryan Sprague’s book, Somewhere in the Skies, that you were doing data analysis work with UFODATA. Was that related to the Hessdalen project or are those two related?” I asked.
“Not really. I had been working with Mark Rodeghier, Alex Wendt and Ronald Masters on the UFODATA project. My role was to choose the instruments, perform tests and then decide on strategies. I was tasked with being in charge of how to use the instruments and, above all, testing a new spectroscopic apparatus that I was using at my home and doing the calculations at that time, but that was not directly related to Hessdalen. But Erling Strand, who is the chief of the Hessdalen project, was also involved in the UFODATA project. So, in some way it was related, yes.”
“What I liked about what I had read is that scientists were collaborating to apply scientific methods to analyze data that governments are ignoring. Governments, including the United States, are not pursuing a study of the data, so this is an independent consortium of scientists of which you are a part,” I said.
“Indeed, it was independent, but it was composed of a body of very competent PhDs, some were renowned, like professor Hakan Kayal, in Würzburg, Germany. But we were not associated with any university department. I had been working for only one year, but very intensely, with the Galileo project, led by Professor Avi Loeb. I don’t work with them anymore because there were some disagreements with a few people. However, I totally support the project. They are a team of fantastic engineers and scientists. In this case, the Galileo Project is based at Harvard University and the funding has been obtained by Avi through several sources. Unlike UFODATA, The Galileo Project is university funded.”
“Avi’s work is very mainstream?” I asked, not wanting to disparage Avi, but to call out the differences.
“Avi is highly intelligent. I recognize that absolutely, his work is clearly logical, and he doesn’t say that whatever we see in the sky are aliens. He admits that it could be some natural phenomenon: manmade, Skunk Works, etc. All of these things he admits but is interested in the possibility that we have been visited and this idea came when he analyzed the data regarding Oumuamua, which was very strange. People thought, in the beginning, that Oumuamua was a comet inside the solar system, but it was behaving in a totally different way than a comet or an asteroid. The object had a fast acceleration, so this enabled us to deduce that it was coming from another stellar system. Also it didn’t have a tail. There were several aspects that were particularly strange, and so he did several calculations which he published in peer-reviewed journals, stating the possibility that it could be a relic of a gigantic alien spacecraft.” I had to clarify something with Massimo regarding Avi’s work. “I accept the fact that when we see anomalous behavior in the skies, it could be unexplainable by our current scientific knowledge. So you see an orb in the sky. It could be something that our science cannot yet account for. However, there seems to be a psychic element to it. Like you said, when you were lying on top of your car, smoking a cigarette, you received a telepathic message to look over in a particular direction. There’s some kind of telepathic aspect to this, or something else going on,” I said.
“Absolutely yes, I have to admit. As a scientist, it’s like we’re priests. We cannot blaspheme. Instead, my duty, which is an ethical moral duty, is to take note of everything, even things that are scandalous, although always maintaining a rigorous approach methodologically.
“In the past I had come to know the work of Professor Harley Rutledge. The study was done between 1973 and 1980 in Missouri. At some point there was a so-called UFO flap in the area. People were seeing UFOs every day, practically. Being a professor of solid-state physics, he decided to use his own PhD students to take measurements of the Phenomenon. He was not able to take good measurements, unfortunately. But in his book Project Identification, Professor Rutledge stated that often, when he was preparing an instrument, zooming a lens or activating something like a laser, it seemed like the Phenomenon knew what he was doing. And there was a synchronicity of several kinds, not only between the Phenomenon and him, but also between the Phenomenon and his colleagues in the study. I have to admit there is something here that has to do with our consciousness. Professor Rutledge is a man like me who calculates. And like Avi. But Professor Rutledge admitted that there was this strangeness in his observations. Avi would never admit that, and in that sense, he’s absolutely mainstream, you’re right.” I interjected. “This is noted in many cases. For instance, like some of the navy pilots who had the Tic Tac sighting. According to Commander David Fravor, the Tic Tac accelerated with intentionality, catching up to the pilots and zooming past them, playing cat and mouse. Also, pilots have a term called a cap point. In aviation parlance the cap point is agreed upon before a mission. It is something that only they know, like a strategic triangulation point. At one point, after rapidly accelerating past him, David Fravor saw the Tic Tac object move to the cap point, which was like the Phenomena saying: I’m reading your mind.”
“Could this science have something to do with our consciousness? Could there be some other kind of science that we don’t have a word for yet?” I asked.
Massimo folded his hands and spoke very seriously. “I am very interested in the notion of quantum entanglement, which is incredibly similar to telepathy or something like that. It happens between particles, but a very similar thing seems to happen in our mind. We are not able to record it because we cannot demonstrate it, but it happens. The problem is not that our science is wrong. Although being very accurate, our science is very narrow in its focus, as it should be. But our science isn’t holistic. As such it leaves something missing. The problem is that the matter of our study is totally separated from our mind. It’s the Cartesian paradigm: res extensa and res cogitans, the thought is here and the matter is there. It might be wrong because it could be that consciousness is able to affect matter and therefore, we would enter into the realm of the paranormal. As in the case of the quantum entanglement mechanism between particles, our mind could be entangled with another mind. It could also be entangled with an object and if it is entangled, the two things that are entangled are describable by only one wave function, using the terms of quantum physics. As if we are only one thing.
“According to David Bohm, quantum physicist, the universe is completely united. Bohm says that there is another level of reality which he calls implicate order and in which things are connected—by what?—apparently, by a feeling, which is not a quantity but rather a quality. The glue of this connection is a sort of animal emotion. It’s a feeling, and our science is not able to quantify this because it doesn’t include those things.”
“Have you ever read John Keel?” I interjected.
“Yes, in the ancient past.”
Keel wrote that future science might be more like shamanism. In preparing to write this book, I reread Susan’s essay “Through a Magikal Lens.” In that essay she writes that Aleister Crowley defined magic as “the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with the Will.” Perhaps more highly developed beings can transform space and time at will, traversing incredible distances, changing the basic structure of things, and penetrating other dimensions. As the Russian scientist Nikolai Kardashev proposed, regarding the types of advanced civilizations we might find in the universe, a Type III civilization is able to extract energy and raw materials from their galaxy. It is capable of intergalactic travel via wormholes, and able to use intergalactic communication and perform galactic engineering.
Sounds like magic to me.
“My wife,” Massimo continued, “Susan Demeter, wrote a book called Cosmic Witch. Susan points out that witches are scientists, too. Their magic is based on nature and nature is exactly what we’re studying. What if the aliens have developed their own technology? Not from science, but from magic. What would have happened if magic had not been crashed down by the church? What if magic had continued to develop its course? Imagine the technology that would have come from it. This is a big interrogation mark that is pestering me all the time.” “John Keel proposes that future science is similar to what you’re saying. That it includes magic,” I said.
As Keel wrote in The Eighth Tower, “The world of tomorrow will not be a world of wall-to-wall television and spaceships in every garage. It will be a world of oracles. We may be able to accurately forecast the future and avert terrible disasters. We may be able to levitate ourselves and great blocks of stones so we can build pyramids in our backyards. If we can just develop ESP on a practical level, we can drive the telephone company into bankruptcy.”
“This is an interrogation mark because magic assumes that mind and matter can interact together. Contemporary science says absolutely no,” said Massimo. I thanked Massimo, having tremendously enjoyed our conversation. This was just the beginning. I knew we’d be speaking again. We’ve all been swimming in the same waters for a long while. Before I had read Susan Demeter’s essay “Through a Magikal Lens” in Deep Weird, Susan and I knew each other through Facebook. We were mutual friends of UK-based writer Anthony Peake. Both Susan and I had been guests on Anthony’s Consciousness Hour show.
But I must peel the onion to get to the heart of the synchronicities here.
I wrote to Anthony after coming across his book The Hidden Universe, saying that my book Falling from Trees seemed to have been inspired by his, although I read his book after I wrote mine. Uncanny. Anthony replied that when he was reading my book on a train to his aunt’s house outside of London, he read the chapter “The Three Bridges” as he pulled into the Three Bridges station.
As Eric Wargo writes in his book Time Loops, the more we pay attention to synchronicities and precognitions, the more we notice their occurrences. Editor’s Note: This feature is used with the permission of it’s author, Mike Fiorito, and it’s publisher Apprentice House Press (Loyola University Maryland) from Mike’s book, UFO Symphonic: Journeys into Sound.
