"Defence officials finally confirmed Norway's suspicions that the swirl was caused by a technical failure in a Bulava missile launched by a nuclear sub." Immediately after however, the "Defence official" becomes "Russian defence analyst" Pavel Felgenhauer, who is a well-known civilian journalist, well known for his arguments with Russian officialdom!

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Felgenhauer

The assumption that the Bulava missile was launched from a submarine (and a nuclear submarine at that!) is somewhat shaky. This particular missile is in the prototype stage, and has had many failures. It is unlikely therefore that this dangerous missile got anywhere near the installation stage in any operational submarine, whether nuclear or diesel-electric.

Now you see it now you don't? Trick of the light, perhaps? Subliminal programming, from beginning to end? Or an Implicit part of the implicit acceptance/denial schedules of the phenomenon itself? Talk about commercial breaks - Instant Whip Jello hasn't got a chance!

In this example have a typical Fortean  Matter/Mind interface: technology, urban legend, multiple contradictions, vague reports and multi-media speculations combined a with a truly spectacular "physical" display. Again, as with the recent discussions here concerning the Marrs "Dallas" UFO, we have a somewhat Fortean "event" with typical components of different dimensions of psychological interpretation.

What we might call the pixels of perception  (the monads of Leibnitz and the memes of Dawkins come to mind) appear to be activated along a scale which varies between Plato's theoretical limits of absolute fact and absolute fiction. This scale is a mapping of  highly differentiated contrasts between variations of the concrete and the metaphysical, the whole being linked together by  a dynamic story-technology which "manages" varying degrees of credibility according to psycho-social information-processing. I have a copy of a CNN video (shot by several Norwegian young people from the bedroom window) of the said spiral. This in no way corresponds to motion suggested by the still photograph (attached), and has another characteristic  - the spiral stops, and reverses to a counter-clockwise motion! Or is this an "optical Illusion" - the larval stage of "fact?"

I suppose this might even create notions of  these young children having access to  video-processing, or that their parents were technicians of some sort. This kind of  soap-opera develops in strings, just like the exhaust pulses clearly seen in the video, a rather "real" episode in our casual comedy of deconstruction. The same multi-layered perception can been see in the classic cases of the Cottingley Fairies and the Stephen Darbishire UFO. Such grainy differentials can be seen also in the major UFO incidents such as Rendlesham Forest and Roswell.

As with the Marrs "Dallas" UFO (see below) we will encounter brutalist separations of mechanical fact and mechanical fiction. These are additional mythological  dramatisations whose strong staging we can add to our Fortean mix. We might conclude that from scratches on old film to spectacular "physical" displays, what we call "consciousness" is very definitely multi-media, and the "real" is a construct as is all else. A fist can be put through the shaky scenery of the "real," but watch out for the stage managers, who might just put you on a holiday to nowhere.

Finding all kinds of quantum analogies here would make a fine Xmas boxed game. I would give such a game the title of "intelligent debris," a truly post-modern concept if ever there was!

CB