With its hot springs and glaciers, the dormant volcano at the southern edge of the Cascade Range has always been sacred to Native Americans, some of whom view it as central to their creation myth.But it was the Yreka teenager, Frederick Spencer Oliver, who blew the mystical door wide open in the 1880s when he claimed that an ancient native of Lemuria had used him as a “channel” to write a manuscript that described a buried city with walls “polished as by jewelers, though excavated by giants.”
Residents who say they speak for the inhabitants of that underground realm have since multiplied.Oliver “was the earliest channel in this area,” said historian William Miesse, who put together a vast bibliography of primary sources on the mountain and its lore for the College of the Siskiyous.
“Now,” Miesse said, “you can hardly miss a channel walking down Main Street.”
In a 1932 Los Angeles Times Magazine article, Edward Lanser wrote of seeing Mt. Shasta “ablaze with a strange reddish-green light” from the window of his Oregon-bound train. “Lemurians,” a fellow passenger confided.
Returning to explore the legend further, Lanser was told that tall men from a sunken civilization were known to patronize local stores, buying “enormous quantities of sulfur as well as a great deal of salt.”
In a stroke of fortune for the Mount Shasta economy, the items were “always paid for with gold nuggets, and the gold always far exceeds the value of the merchandise.”
Lansing’s account came as another spiritual movement was building near the mountain: violet-clad followers who believed that loving “Ascended Masters,” Jesus among them, could teach humans to raise their vibrational levels and thus pass freely between Earth and the eternal realm. The movement is still prominent in Shasta.
As for UFOs, reported sightings exploded in the 1950s and persist today. Appearances by rank-smelling Bigfoot, also called Yeti, came later. Tales of dwarfs and fairies flavor the mix.
“Lewis Carroll’s White Queen, who famously said: ‘Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast,’ would feel right at home here,” said Michael Roesch, a retired College of the Siskiyous professor who wrote the Shasta project’s folklore segment.
Roesch said the true believers are good neighbors who “recycle and readily give hugs,” but he wondered about the consequences of their cosmology: “If you believe wisdom comes from a 35,000-year-old channeled spirit named Ramtha, why would you bother reading the Great Books?”
The upside, spiritual guide Andrew Oser argued in the Mountain Spirit Chronicles — a newspaper that Ashalyn publishes twice yearly — is that “in these times of rapid change, there is a great need for people who can maintain their equanimity in the midst of any earthquakes, nuclear disasters, or bank collapses.”
“Just like the mountain,” he wrote, “they radiate a calming energy that impacts all those around them.”
Wallenstein, a student of Eastern mysticism, left New Jersey as a teen and eventually made his way to the mountain.
His cluttered house — filled with musical instruments and lush plants — lies equidistant from Mt. Shasta and the imposing Black Butte. The geometry, he said, gives one of the bedrooms a “hum.”
A father of two, Wallenstein owned a car repair shop before turning to computers and children’s books.
His latest project, he said, stemmed from experience: In 1987, he saw a family of Yeti emerge from an abandoned cabin on the mountain. He says a reversal of gravity on one grade often pulls his Subaru uphill. As for spacecraft, he’s “watched UFOs … head into the mountain.”
After mulling a book on local sightings for two decades, Wallenstein said, he decided to move on it “before more of the original locals pass on.”
His goal: to rattle the presumptions of those who resist the unknown.
For help coaxing recalcitrant witnesses to confide in him, Wallenstein has turned to Pamela Padula. He reasoned that someone with her background — years of working in fire lookout stations and a family with law enforcement roots in the region — can help convince old-timers that sharing their sightings won’t cause them to be labeled crazy.
As a teen, Padula said, she once saw three small triangular craft hovering noiselessly in formation. Her boyfriend, sister and future in-laws watched with her, she said.
“I do know what I saw,” said Padula, 51. “I don’t know that it was anything extraterrestrial, but it was definitely unidentifiable to me.”
Wallenstein long has been an explorer of the boundary between the real and the metaphorical, with a good dose of grounded humor. “I’m cosmic,” he said, “but I eat meat.” To him, the search is all about opening up to possibility.
“If you think about it empirically, there’s got to be life all over the universe,” he said, his voice quickening with an isn’t-it-obvious frustration. “Otherwise we wouldn’t be here.”
Mt Shasta
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