In Montgomery Alabama
Captain Button's A10 Crash
Copyright
2003
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This site is about a conflict of human physiology that shaped history but was undetected until the 1960's.
In the entire history of man on the planet Earth this phenomenon was discovered only once.
It caused mental breaks for office workers.
You will find this material hard to believe.
This phenomenon is explained in first semester psychology lectures where students don't believe it either.
For that reason I wrote a demonstration that will allow you to experience the phenomenon.
The Everquest Connection page has the explanation and assumes you have not taken basic psychology.
The solution for this problem was the office Cubicle.
This site argues that the this phenomenon causes College Suicides and Missing Students.
The phenomenon causes mental events around the world, Chaco Canyon.
If you use computers in unprotected workspace such as homes, dorms, student apartments, and small business offices read ...Prevention... at the bottom of most pages.
Long term exposure can cause severely altered mental states. Qi Gong Kundalini Yoga
If you are visiting the site as part of a school project send the person responsible for controlling violence at your school to this site.
The compass is the box that appears to be on a stalk at the upper corner of the HUD screen.
The apparent "stalk" is part of the HUD support and is not attached to the compass.
The upper pilot's right corner of the HUD screen is on that compass in this picture. (See second photo below.)
I have searched other cockpit photos from air shows and Air Force photo galleries. There is no other aircraft with this arrangement.
(Both photos are from the US Air Force photo site.)
Note the position of the compass and altimeter in this A10 simulator picture. Looking forward the pilot's line of sight passes between them.
POPE AIR FORCE BASE, N.C. (AFPN) -- 1st Lt. Joden Werlin settles into the A-10 simulator before participating in Virtual Red Flag, a multi-base, joint operational training exercise. Lieutenant Werlin is assigned to 75th Fighter Squadron. (U.S. Air Force photo by Lisa Terry McKeown)
Captain Button
On April 2, 1997 Captain Craig Button drifted out of formation and flew his A10 five hundred miles cross country then crashed in Colorado. His plane was seen looping and diving around the top of a mountain. There were puffs of smoke observed by some witnesses before the crash.
The Air Force performed an extensive investigation but could not find any factor that would have caused the event. The final conclusion is that he committed suicide. That is consistent with the theory on this page.
The same phenomenon that I believe caused this crash also causes the suicides of college students. It would have caused the suicide of Shawn Woolley. College Suicides The Everquest Connection
I have been searching for something inside the cockpit of an A10 that could have been mistaken for movement to create repeating peripheral vision reflexes.
Tonight I found a picture of a cockpit with a compass mounted close beside the heads-up display. An altimeter appears to be in the same position but on the left side of that display. I don't know why that didn't attract my attention before. The previous pictures I found may not have had that compass or the cockpit picture may have cropped it out.
That first image was from a gaming site. But I now have US Air Force images showing that arrangement in planes that are on duty here, in Iraq, and at duty stations around the world.
I have begun to search. when I have the time available, for any other plane that has a source of movement at a similar place in the cockpit.
The question now is was the same compass in Captain Button's plane and the cockpits of others who have crashed?
Why this is significant.
When the pilot looked to the left, at the altimeter, then back to the heads-up screen while making a turn to the right, the compass dial would have rotated from right to left. This would be apparent movement toward the pilot. That movement could be detected as threat movement to cause a peripheral vision reflex.
All humans have a evolutionarily developed, retained, warning system that attempts to break our concentration to warn us if movement is detected moving toward us. This movement is generally from behind. We call that warning system Peripheral Vision Reflexes. If you have ever been startled or caught something out of the corner of your eye, that was a peripheral vision reflex.
About fifty years ago designers of business offices discovered there is a conflict of our physiology, involving this detection system, that can cause a mental break. By the 1960's the Cubicle became the industry standard to prevent those mental breaks in business offices. That is called Cubicle Level Protection. Estimates on-line say that about sixty percent of US workers use Cubicles.
Outside the United States, in the interior design field, the phenomenon is called Subliminal Distraction. I have not found a name for it here. Subliminal Distraction has another meaning in psychology in the US. It is used to refer to sound you hear when you are attempting to concentrate, and must ignore every thing happening around you.
In those early business offices the stimulus would have been other staff walking close beside an unprotected desk. A concentrating mental state is necessary to engage this problem. We all do that when we perform Knowledge work. The act of viewing a computer screen for comprehension, reading a book, performing math calculations, word-processing, or even eyes-open daydreaming require that mental investment.
We have the ability to ignore the reflex when the movement is benign, not a danger to us. But due to the facts of the physiology of sight we can't "stop subliminally seeing" the movement that triggers those reflexes.
You are unaware that the brain system is still detecting repeating movement and trying to force a reflex.
When a threshold of exposure is reached a mental event happens. The nature of that event is determined by several factors. The ability to detect movement in far peripheral vision may be heightened by inherited factors such as eye shape and the number of rods packed in non-macular areas of the retina. Personality traits, including the propensity to daydream, are other possible factors.
What causes the mental break?
I don't know.
On the Cause of Mental Illness page I proposed that since your brain must grow connections between neurons to create memory; in the effort to understand and correctly evaluate the subliminal input it makes inappropriate connections. When enough of these connections exist the brain cannot function and the mental break is the outcome.
If the stimulation stops then those connections disappear due to disuse. The victim of the mental break recovers with little harm. But if the stimulus repeats for long periods the strength of the connections grow from repeating use.
The recovery from intense but short term exposure appears in ICU Psychosis.
Qi Gong and Kundalini Yoga have both the eyes-open concentrating mental state and movement in peripheral vision when the exercises are done in groups. Both exercises have psychotic mental breaks associated with them.
When exposure in those exercises is long term, some users exhibit narrowly focused, psychotic, altered mental states and belief systems. Beliefs that you can levitate, dematerialize at will, walk through solid objects and the belief that you can communicate and direct the actions of others by telepathy are psychotic not religious.
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This page has been rushed onto the site. I have emails out and may revise the page later. August 28, 2005 11:47 PM- EST
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The Czar 52 crash page contains the same theory related to side-by-side seating of the pilot and co-pilot in large bombers and commercial airliners.
A new page Astronauts & Insanity is about the phenomenon and the Belgian Polar Expedition of 1989/99. Eighteen men confined in the cabin of the small ship, the Belgica, trapped in polar ice or several months began to have serious psychiatric symptoms. One became a deaf mute, another hid in remote small spaces to sleep believing that the others were plotting to kill him, and one died of heart failure attributed to fear. (There is a book about this event. I have only the on-line article at present.)
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Links
News links from CNN and others do not appear in Google searches.
The Rick Ross site has the AP Wire story
http://www.rickross.com/reference/jw/jw1.html
News Hour On-line - Transcript
Included an interview with Lt Gen Frank Campbell - The crash site had not been located when this piece was aired.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/jan-june97/plane_4-17.html
Tom Bearden
This site argues that the KGB caused two A10 crashes by using a secret mind control weapon. Strange... but if the crash details are correct it reveals a second crash of an instructor. That second crash would have been attributed to spatial disorientation. But the compass and altimeter in her cockpit would have been easily visible when lighted at night.
Bio of Author cited on website:
"President and Chief Executive Officer,
CTEC, Inc. Lieutenant Colonel US. Army (Retired). MS Nuclear Engineering,
Georgia Institute of Technology. BS mathematics, Northeast Louisiana
University. Graduate of Command & General Staff College, US. Army. Graduate
of Guided Missile Staff Officers Course, U. S. Army (equivalent to MS in
Aerospace Engineering). Numerous electronic warfare and counter-countermeasures
courses."
Russian Lethal Psychoenergetics Mind Control Tests Over the U. S.
http://www.cheniere.org/explore%20articles/mind%20control3/p06.htm
Chart of the Button flight http://www.cheniere.org/images/weapons/cropped/A10mc1.jpg
Flew into ground in night training mission. May 27, 1997 (?) If True http://www.cheniere.org/images/weapons/cropped/A10mc3.jpg
Curriculum Vitae http://www.cheniere.org/misc/bearden%20cv%20long.htm
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New pages are created by editing the Peripheral Vision page. That text is below.
What is Peripheral Vision ?
There are many definitions for peripheral vision in psychology. Non-Macular vision, non-foveal vision, and ambient vision are all peripheral vision.
The area of peripheral vision discussed on this site is just past the periphery of conscious vision on either side of the head. You may consider this as a thin cone wrapping around the normal cone of conscious vision.
This area of vision operates subliminally. No one is aware of the subliminal operation until movement is detected and a peripheral vision reflex happens.
You may be familiar with the phrase, 'catching something out of the corner of your eye.' When that happens you have experienced a peripheral vision reflex. Both the human vision startle reflex as well as weaker reflexes are derived through peripheral vision. Only movement is detected so stationary objects in this area of peripheral vision are invisible.
Peripheral Vision is monocular, each eye sees a different field rather than the overlapping fields of conscious sight.
The speed of approach for moving objects must be determined by increasing size or by the speed at which the image crosses the retina.
Proximity is also determined by increasing size and by the amount of space, number of rods, covered by the moving image. This monocular system to evaluate movement can make mistakes of perception so that peripheral vision reflexes are created when the situation would not warrant it.
An area of the retina made up of mostly rods supplies the signal to the brain, therefore, Peripheral Vision is black and white vision.
There are experiments now on-line, which demonstrate some color vision in peripheral vision but they made no reference to Subliminal Peripheral Vision. In earlier searches I found experiments done by college students which demonstrated that there was a high error rate when colored cards were slipped into peripheral vision from behind. (If there sites are still up I will cite the URL.)
Although sound is sensory adaptable, vision is not. Micro movements of the eye constantly refresh sensor cells on rods and cones. This prevents chemical depletion of sensor cells.
Although you can ignore objects or movement in your vision field you cannot stop seeing them This is because it is possible to attach different levels of attention or 'notice' to objects in your vision field.
Humans can 'habituate to extinction notice taken of moving objects in peripheral vision.' This means you can see something in peripheral vision and not have it recorded by your conscious mind. Weak peripheral vision reflexes can be overridden. Habituation causes the stimulus to fade from attention.
Conscious sight has depth perception and persistence of vision. Peripheral
vision does not, except for the ‘apparent size' illusion and/or the rate
of movement the illusion may create. The flicker fusion rate is the point at
which flicker is no longer detectable. This varies from person to person. These
two Wikipedia articles discuss this. They are incomplete and have no citation
references.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_of_vision
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fusion_threshold
This has implications for early computer games that were played using a Television as the viewing monitor. The scan rate for Television is determined by the sixty cycle power line frequency. Alternating frame lines are scanned every sixtieth of a second. A full frame is drawn every thirtieth of a second. This interlacing smoothes the "page flipping" effect. I still do not have a definitive article on this but I believe it means that flicker from a TV can be detected in Subliminal Peripheral Vision.
If two persons play these TV monitor games, dual controller, the "off player" can be exposed to stimulation in Subliminal Peripheral Vision if they turn their head while not controlling play. As the head is turned back toward the TV the flicker appears to approach from behind providing stimulus to create a Peripheral Vision Reflex. The psychology involved is explained on the Everquest Connection page.
There is some information that the
preteen suicide rate began to rise about the time of the introduction of the
cartridge computer games, Atari, Commodore, Sega, and others.
There is no long term memory normally associated with peripheral vision. There
are news releases of experiments posted on the Internet which indirectly reveal
this.
Peripheral vision reflexes are created at a level in the brain below thought, reason, and consciousness. For this reason when you choose to ignore movement that is distracting to you and that is positioned in your Subliminal Peripheral Vision you lose track of it.
Conflict of Physiology
The conflict of our physiology explored on this site is that although you can ignore peripheral vision reflexes, you cannot stop seeing the movement that causes them. You cannot tell your brain to stop subliminally detecting that movement and attempting to force the reflex.
Peripheral Vision Reflexes
Peripheral vision reflexes are an evolutionarily developed, retained, warning system. For early man or pre-humans to survive they needed a system to warn them of predators approaching from behind. To function it must work all the time no matter what you are doing. If you had the ability to turn the brain system off at will, it could not warn you in critical situations.
The act of concentrating on something at arm's length, in your hand for instance, causes physiological changes in the eye.
When you focus on a close object your eye accommodates by changing the shape of the lens. This shape-change expands the area covered by Subliminal Peripheral Vision.
Plitz's reflex, or Attention Reflex, changes the size of your pupil. This floods the retina with ambient light desensitizing the rods so that only a large movement close by will trigger a reflex.
M and P Pathways
Although all signals from the retina travel on the optic nerve there are actually two pathways. They route the signals from conscious sight and peripheral vision to different parts of the brain. This allows humans to have two vision systems running at the same time. The pathway from peripheral vision is subliminally observed.
http://www.vestibular.org/computer.html
Links
Nightwalking
"In The Book of Five Rings, Miyamoto Musashi, the legendary swordsman of 16th century Japan, implies that he fought his greatest duels with his eyes crossed, and goes into considerable detail about developing and using this strange abitlity."
The method suggested to engage peripheral vision is to suspend an object from the bill of a baseball cap and practice staring at it rather than looking straight ahead as we all normally do.
The site has a page on the physiology of the eye and sight. It describes the normal field of vision.
http://www.navaching.com/hawkeen/nwalk.html#Anchor-The-59125
Institute for Innovative Blind Navigation
Don't let the site name put you off. This site has several pages which explain sight and how the brain deals with two vision systems.
http://www.wayfinding.net/index.htm
This page has the vision material. http://www.wayfinding.net/vsionsys.htm#four
The Red Myth
Color in Vision
http://stlplaces.com/night_vision.html
University of Missouri
The first paragraph on this page refers to psychological factors effecting pupil dilation.
"Interestingly, the pupil/iris combination also changes in response to psychological factors. One sign of activation of the sympathetic nervous system, which is a system important in arousal, fight, and flight, is dilated pupils. For example, sexual interest results in pupil dilation. (This piece of information may come in handy some time.)"
http://web.umr.edu/~psyworld/eye.htm
University of Utah
John Moran Eye Center -- Anatomy
http://webvision.med.utah.edu/
Kimball's Biology Pages
A simple explanation of the eye and sight.
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/V/Vision.html
Understanding Human Vision
This site deals with color.
http://www.pitir.com/pentile/Human_Vision.html
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and site navigation.
Prevention:
This section is now repeated at the bottom of most pages.
The rare occurrence of the
injury establishes that is difficult to create enough exposure to cause an
injury. But when it does happen the consequences are serious, possibly fatal.
Our personal experience
was intermittent human traffic during eight-hour workdays for thirty calendar
days.
If you have a tower CPU mount
it under your desk. That's the way they position it in a cubicle. The hard drive
busy light is about the height of your low peripheral vision if you put the
tower on the desk. Desktop reading of text or writing notes beside the keyboard
on the side of the monitor away from the tower makes the blinking hard drive
busy light appear to approach from behind when you turn to view the screen
again.
If you have a computer work
station/desk in which you turn ninety degrees to write or do other non computer
work, turn off the monitor when you turn aside. Remove screen savers in this
instance. The movement, animation for example, in your screensaver,
two-dimensional movement, might well be detected by your peripheral vision at
close range. Alternately cover the monitor screen.
All home, apartment, or
dorm computer workstations are in unprotected workspace.
To change that put the computer in a quiet room with no possible movement. If
that is not possible in a dorm or apartment position the computer so that your
peripheral vision can see only stationary walls as you use the computer in a
busy room. In Cubicles and 'Systems Furniture' these protective features are
achieved with peripheral vision blocking panels and corner seating positions. It
is called 'Cubicle Level Protection.'
If you use computer or CD-ROM
games for many hours day after day, the game playing position should follow the
same rules as the computer workstation. Battery operated games will not run long
enough on a single rechargeable battery to cause a risk for SPVP.
Although a laptop does not
have a visible blinking light in peripheral vision the same rules apply to your
work position. There should not be human traffic moving to you from
behind. There should be nothing behind you, which could enter your subliminal
peripheral vision field as you turn your head while working at the laptop and be
mistaken for threat movement.
Only movement coming from
behind you into your Subliminal Peripheral Vision can cause a peripheral vision
reflex. If the movement source approaches you from ahead then enters your
Subliminal Peripheral Vision from conscious sight there can be no peripheral
vision reflex.
Repeated for Emphasis:
A single session or rare
sessions will not cause this problem.
It is the same day after day
long hours of play or computer use with detectable movement in ‘Subliminal
Peripheral Vision,’ which would form the basis of a risk for SPVP injury.
The brain’s detection system only evaluates movement. There is little recognition of the nature of the object in peripheral vision. If you have several hours exposure from human traffic at the library, while reading at an open table or seated in a reading room chair, followed by long hours watching TV with a critically misplaced ceiling fan sweeping detectable shadows around the room, the combination of those two behaviors might cause the problem. The suggestion is that either activity alone would not consume enough exposure time even if the critical movement is present.
Copyright 2003
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