PINK ELEPHANT FOXTROT
WHAT IS A PINK ELEPHANT, EXACTLY?
For those who don’t see life in metaphors, it’s – well -- an Elephant that is Pink. As a metaphor, though, a Pink Elephant is something impossible not to notice, but so controversial you have to dance around it.
My story involves the interaction between a multimedia work of art, Storyboard Of A Dream, and a series of UAP sightings that began in February, 2021 in Central California.
The objects I photographed in November of that year were nearly identical to images that had been created for Storyboard Of A Dream two months earlier, careening me into an exploration of the psychic phenomena associated with UAP’s.
Is there a Message Within The Medium when it comes to the UAP experience? Does it stimulate the same part of our brain we use to create and appreciate art? What is the connection?
PinkElephantFoxtrot.com and the Pink Elephant Foxtrot YouTube Channel are episodic and dedicated to the open discussion of these taboo topics, with recurring segments - Loud Hailer and Culture Crunch - that examine the daily Pink Elephants we encounter in the arts, society, technology, and politics.
PinkElephantFoxtrot.com is also a place to purchase original art, and real UAP imagery on a variety of items.
EPISODE 1:
STORYBOARD OF A DREAM
My story starts with an original multimedia work of art called Storyboard Of A Dream. Begun in Spring, 2001 and completed almost two years later, Storyboard Of A Dream combines reflective photography with digital painting. All of the 49 windows in this reflective image of a building in downtown San Francisco are distinct yet inter-related. The images are distorted, so instead of taking a literal, paint-by-numbers approach, I decided to treat each like a Rorschach test, allowing myself to be guided solely by my imagination.
I wanted the colors and textures to be extremely vivid, like they are in dreams, so I developed a technique I nicknamed Amalgamation.
The process is a marriage of photographic reflection and digital painting that utilizes colors and textures hidden within the reflection itself. It begins with a reflective image taken under the right circumstances. If there is no over-exposure, the image will hold a myriad of hidden colors and unique textures.
The process of coaxing them out is not as simple as flicking a light switch, though. Frequently these colors and textures are not uniform and contain grit. After their initial coaxing, they are meticulously cleansed, smoothed out, and subject to a series of manipulations to clarify and intensify. It is a time consuming, layered, step-by-step process of refinement.
Each row of Storyboard Of A Dream is titled and has an original element of the source photo that is left unsaturated, to represent how our subconscious shields us from life’s Pink Elephants.
We all have inner blinds that we regulate for a variety of relationships while we are awake, so in the first row, Blinds Half Drawn, I left the blinds untouched. The only window with the blinds painted over is the one in which art is being created. (Albeit by Abstract-Expressionist Aliens).
ROWS AND WINDOWS
As I got started on this first row, I found myself placing disc-shaped craft in several of the windows, without the slightest idea why.
The window to the left is titled “Foreshadowing? We Don’t Need No Stinking Foreshadowing!” because I introduce several of the characters and symbols used throughout Storyboard Of A Dream to tell the story. Note the golden disc floating in from top left in the painted version.
In the Window to the right, “Abstract Aliens And Their Spacious Underwater Studio,” the blinds are gone, and the title says it all. But at the time I had no idea why my subconscious conflagrated aliens with abstract art. Several months after these images were created, in November of 2001, I had a better understanding after I photographed something mysterious that blurred the line between art and the UAP experience.
I decided to turn these images into real works of art by applying the same techniques I had developed to create Storyboard Of A Dream. Many of these UAP images are available for purchase on this site, and more will be made available in future Episodes. Fine art prints of UAP Art, Storyboard Of A Dream, and Apparition City images (www.davidzimbalist.zenfolio.com) can also be custom ordered on paper and metal in a variety of sizes via: Stretto@pinkelephantfoxtrot.com
Here are a few examples of UAP Art from photos taken on November 19th, 2021.
Breaching The Continuum, Source
Breaching The Continuum
Reflector
Reflector, Source
The Sky Is My Canvas, Source
The Sky Is My Canvas
Storyboard Of A Dream Row 1, Window 3: Entering The Void
It was a little after 9am on a slightly overcast Thursday morning when I was playing with my dog at our local park. I tossed her tennis ball into the middle of the field, but she wouldn’t go after it. When I went to pick up the ball I suddenly had the strong sensation there was something right above my head. It felt like static electricity.
I looked over my shoulder as I stood up, and there, hovering in the sky no more than about 800-1000 feet above me, was a fleet of what had to be at least 10-12 white, luminous, disc-shaped UAPs. They weren’t completely still. Each made small concentric circles above me as they hovered.
I felt the wind get knocked out of my lungs for the first time since high school gym class. I was so terrified that my first reaction was to make a defensive “X” with my arms across my face. I fumbled for my cell phone, but before I could find the camera the objects were flying off in formation. They moved up and down, synchronized in a wave-like motion resembling a flag turned sideways rippling in the wind.
The experience was unnerving. I remember going home and staring at the UAPs in the first row of Storyboard Of A Dream. I had the deep-seated feeling that my choice to include them wasn’t a coincidence. I decided to follow this feeling and see where it led. I sat down at the computer, and in a matter of minutes I drew a little UAP into Window 3, Entering the Void, as if to say “Start Here.” That little saucer would became responsible for all that would follow both in Storyboard Of A Dream and in my waking life.
FIRST SIGHTING: THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 25th, 2021 9:05AM
In the months that followed my sighting of a fleet of UAPs on February 25th, 2021, images of flying discs were not the only images that filled my head. I became obsessed with technology, and more specifically the clean energy theories of Nikola Tesla, a subject I had never shown interest in before. Slowly, the art for Storyboard Of A Dream and the ramifications of the sighting became intertwined.
At first the mages of flying discs were inserted somewhat randomly, with humor. But the images got more serious as the project advanced.
EPISODE 2:
ARE ARTISTS SOOTHSAYERS?
Storyboard Of A Dream, Row 2, Window 1: “Knock It Off”
Here are three more examples from Rows 2 and 3 of Storyboard Of A Dream that contain images of flying discs. The images of the discs in the first 3, “Knock It Off,” “Turbulence,” and “Savages Inside The Citadel” are still cartoonish. But in the fourth Window, “Shootout At the Spacetime Corral,” things get a bit more complicated. When I drew that window my thoughts were centered on the new Space Force.
Storyboard Of A Dream, Row 2, Window 6: “Turbulence”
Storyboard Of A Dream, Row 3, Window 6: “Savages Inside The Citadel”
Storyboard Of A Dream, Row 3, Window 7: “Shootout At The Spacetime Corral”
Our willingness as a species to go into battle against a seemingly invincible Giant speaks to the reality of the human condition. Human beings may swagger, but on a collective-subconscious level we know how insignificant we are in the Universe. So, there’s nothing like bringing down that Giant with a slingshot to make a Race feel like it’s something special. It is one of the most ingrained and universal Archetypes:
The Triumph of the Underdog.
But now the myth of David and Goliath is being readied for ultimate export, blasting off soon into the vacuum of space, with no budget cap or congressional oversight. It’s an arrogance that no one down on earth can afford to ignore. Conventional jet aircraft have proven no match for our Visitors in the skies. Most of the time, the game of Tic-Tac-Toe we play with Tic-Tac-shaped UAPs ends in a draw, and no one gets hurt. But that hasn’t always been the case.
On November 23rd, 1953, Lieutenants Felix Moncla and Robert Wilson were ordered to intercept an unknown flying object picked up on radar, over Lake Superior. Moncla and Wilson were finally able to close in, and their radar signal briefly merged with that of the object’s. But then the plane’s signal simply disappeared. And no trace of the plane or its occupants have ever been found.
The new Space Force won’t be using conventional aircraft like this to engage our new friends. Blowing a hole in the Spacetime Continuum will not be as charming as the way it was portrayed in the movie Back To The Future. We are trying to engage with races and technologies that are tens of thousands of years ahead of ours, in an environment we know little about.
Mistakes will be made, and there is a lot at stake.
THE MESSAGE WITHIN THE MEDIUM
On the first YouTube episode of Pink Elephant Foxtrot, we will explore three incidents of mass UAP sightings, including my own, that left witnesses with a very specific message about the fate of the earth.
Ariel School, Zimbabwe
The Zimbabwe Ariel School incident of September 16th, 1994 is the most thoroughly documented case of a mass UAP sighting involving communication with the occupants. Over 60 elementary school students were playing outside when they witnessed two saucer-shaped UAPs descend from the sky, and land in a nearby field.
When the children made eye contact with the occupants, they were given a dire telepathic warning about the fate of the earth, and our destruction of the environment. When they looked away from the eyes of the occupants, the images stopped.
The Message was contained Within the Medium, and that message was clear: our unbridled development and misuse of technology is endangering our species and our planet.
Now, that’s a rather sophisticated concept for a large group of elementary schoolchildren to concoct as a hoax, on their own. And when interviewed years later, the witnesses, then adults, stuck to their stories.
While this case is compelling, the fact that it involved schoolchildren made it easy to dismiss as the product of overactive imaginations. But the case of retired Navy Officer Kevin Day reaffirms what I encountered during my own UAP experience. There is a Message contained Within The Medium.
Ariel School Witness Drawings
On November 14th, 2004, Day was serving in the Navy on the USS Princeton, working in conjunction with the Nimitz off the coast of Baja. Day was responsible for identifying objects tracked by radar and was present when the infamous Tic-Tac UAP incident occurred.
There were several other strange sightings in the days leading up to the Tic-Tac incident, and afterwards Day was haunted. In subsequent interviews he described how his head became filled with disturbing, apocalyptic imagery, something that had never happened to him before. Day had no prior history of sleep disturbances, but after this incident he started having nightmares involving comets impacting the ocean, forest fires, earthquakes, and tsunamis.
Radar still of Tic-Tac UAP
Once again, there was a purposeful and consistent message communicated Within the Medium of simply seeing these objects, and the Message was strikingly similar to the warning imparted to the Ariel schoolchildren.
The fact that there seems to be a psychic component to the UAP experience is a hard concept to grasp. But that is where my story begins.
On another November 14th, 17 years later in 2021, I documented something that also short-circuited my nervous system. It wasn’t just because it was something strange, something that I had never seen photographed before, or since. More so, it was because what I photographed that evening had been drawn into a piece of art that was created a full two months prior to the sighting.
But this plot point should seem somewhat familiar.
In the Steven Spielberg film Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, the two main characters become obsessed with an image of a mountain after their own respective UAP sightings. They draw and sculpt this image obsessively, not knowing why, or what it means. Without giving too much of the plot away, they eventually discover that the mountain is a real place, Devil’s Canyon, in Wyoming.
Art plays a central role in getting to the bottom of the truth in Close Encounters, and this plot point isn’t fiction. It was based on the case studies of French UAP researcher Jacque Vallee, who was an advisor on the film.
The late psychologist Dr. Rollo May also believed there was a Message Within The Medium when it comes to art. Dr. May asserted that Artists Are Soothsayers.
When I saw him lecture, May displayed Picasso’s violent 1937 painting Guernica as an example of art-as-premonition. He felt strongly that it predicted what World War Two had in store for the human race, and it’s rather hard to argue against it.
Pablo Picasso, Guernica
Not convinced yet that art can predict real life events. How about the movie The China Syndrome?
Released on March 16th, 1979, it tells the story of a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania that comes close to having a meltdown. Twelve days after the film was released, the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant, in Pennsylvania, nearly had a total meltdown.
Perhaps the similarities between this movie and real life were merely coincidences. Or is it possible that Dr. May was on to something?
Is the trance-like state we enter when we create art also a gateway to a higher level of consciousness? And is that state somehow connected to the UAP Experience?
EPISODE 2:
THE GUESTS THAT WOULDN’T LEAVE
On October 29th, 2021, I noticed a bright light hovering in the sky, looking Southwest from my front door. At first, I thought it was a star or a planet, but it seemed much closer, and bobbed slightly as it hovered.
The next evening, October 30th, the same light appeared. I was staring at it when I heard my neighbor say excitedly that there was a bigger light visible from his house, looking further West. I walked over and sure enough, there was a larger luminous object hovering in the sky. It looked like it was very close and on fire. It seemed to have discharges coming off its perimeter, and it bobbed and weaved more than the first object.
Over the course of about an hour, the sphere moved West, and by 6:58pm, when I took Video 1 it had moved all the way to the end of our street. Note the huge explosive flash, right at the end of the video:
During the first week of November 2021, the Sphere kept returning to the same coordinates at dusk, moving West. I took photos and videos of it every night that week, but it was always after the object had arrived. On November 6th, at 6:27pm, I finally was able to catch the object as it floated in from the South, moving North towards my neighborhood. It was still light outside when I filmed Video 2.
Video 3 was taken a little later, on November 6th at 6:46pm, after the object settled into its usual place in my neighborhood.
The observations I was able to make with the naked eye and my cellphone that first week were limited, but I noticed some strange characteristics. Each night, the object would go through a series of stages, during which the brightness would intensify in different ways.
In the first stage, the object sometimes appeared to change shape, elongating as it flashed a bright white — almost like an extended flash from a flashbulb. In the second stage, which is visible right at the end of Video 1, it would seem to explode with great force, the outer corona extending many times past the circumference of the object for a fraction of a second.
In Video 4, taken on November 13th, 2021, at 10:15pm, watch carefully as there are a series of flashes that start just to the right of the Sphere and continue moving above it and to the left. I went through the video slowly and discovered 25 flashes in all that I was able to make into Freeze Frames. They seem to show a saucer-shaped craft with a dome flying around the main object:
When I viewed the Freeze Frames from the November 13th video, I realized that there was so much more going on than what I was capturing with my cell phone. I bought a tripod and a remote control to trigger my DSLR camera, and on the evening of Sunday, November 14th, I began to fully document what was occurring.
EPISODE 3:
TESLA AND THE ALL-KNOWING EYE
On the morning of February 25th, 2021, I witnessed a fleet of luminous UFO’s hovering above a local park. In the days and months following that incident, my casual art project became a song stuck on repeat, and it echoed endlessly inside my brain. I became saturated with an overwhelming feeling that Storyboard Of A Dream was about something much larger than myself, and that it simply had to be finished.
In the Hollywood version of this story, my character locks himself in a room with the windows painted black and steps out weeks later with a finished manuscript. If I could have done it that way I would have, but I soon discovered there was absolutely no correlation between hours worked and rate of progress.
When my initial choices did seem right, I could complete a window in a matter of days. But since February 25th an Editor-From-Hell was living inside my head, and he wasn’t satisfied with anything I did. Solid ideas I would spend hours and days on, and that seemed pitch-perfect, turned out not to work at all. There was no explicable reason, other than a strange feeling when things weren't quite right.
For some, erasing what you have done and starting over can be liberating, but I find it terrifying. Hector Berlioz’ March To The Scaffold was the soundtrack on those days. Turning on the computer and hearing it start-up was like listening to the raising of the Guillotine blade.
Storyboard Of A Dream, Row 5, Window 5: “Tesla Levitates His Brain And Magic Helmet On The Throbbing Throne”
I had already drawn Window 5e, “Tesla Levitates His Brain And Magic Helmet On The Throbbing Throne,” but I simply couldn’t find the right image to place above his head. I knew that image was important, so I left it alone for a few more weeks, until the time had come to do what terrified me the most: erase the image completely and start over.
I randomly chose a color and a paintbrush, and simply started painting. I had no idea what I was up to, but the image was done in one sitting. The first thing I did was replace the blue circle above Tesla’s head with a more vivid yellow. But it still wasn’t quite right. I somehow knew that whatever the yellow sphere was, it came from the cosmos, so I placed a small bit of blue “space” at its center. Suddenly, I knew I was on the right path, but there was something missing, something essential.
The All-Knowing Eye
Out of frustration, I grabbed the mouse and angrily scrawled two long, squiggly, orange lines inside the circle, and suddenly, something clicked. The lines were too long, though, and there had to be more of them entering the circle from all sides, like sperm to an ovum. I couldn’t draw them entering from the outside, because the colors were too similar, so I drew the squiggly lines inside the circle instead.
When I finished, I knew I had solved the puzzle, but I had no idea what it meant.
EPISODE 4:
NOVEMBER, 2021 SECOND STAGE
Before we return to the evening of November 14th, let’s take a look at some photos that make a strong case for the Sphere not being Venus or another planet.
On 11/17/21 I took the following series of photos at 6:02pm. My camera was on a tripod and triggered with a remote control.
Watch as the same green triangular-shaped craft appears from behind the top of the Sphere. Also note that what at first appears to be stars is apparently some sort of material closer in the atmosphere. Unless the triangle is translucent, the floating material would seem to be in front of the Triangle rather than behind it, evidenced by the fact that it dots the surface of the Triangular Craft in Photos 3 and 4, and changes position slightly between these two photos. This would seem to indicate that the Triangular craft is in contrary motion with the Sphere.
This photo, taken on 11/17/21 at 6:31pm, shows the Triangular craft way off in the distance above and to the right of the Sphere, at 1:00. Since Lens Flare doesn’t shrink, it would seem that the Triangle is solid.
A fast moving object causing a uniform trail has also appeared in several other photos over several different nights. What is puzzling is that each appearance retains the same general length, regardless of differing shutter speeds. Note the two white Orbs, one above-left of the Triangle and one below and to the right of the Sphere. These Orbs move at will and seem to be intelligently controlled.
The contrary motion between the Sphere and the Triangle are indicative of the Second Stage these objects would go through each night they appeared.
The Spherical Object gets brighter and eventually lets off a series of flashes of very white light. The shape of the object sometimes appears to change during this process, possibly because it is in motion while it flashes. When this occurs, the Triangular Craft and the Sphere frequently move in contrary motion. Sometimes the Sphere stays stationary, as in the next two series of photos.
The sky surrounding the Sphere becomes crowded with particles. In my mind it seems like a cloning process of some sort, so that is what I nicknamed it. Here is a sequence taken on November 17th between 6:41pm and 6:42pm that shows the Triangular Craft moving away from the Sphere in each successive shot.
All of my photos were taken on a fixed tripod triggered by a remote control to avoid vibration. The trees in the foreground are stationary, which means the motion is a product of the Triangle.
Assuming the white Orb is stationary, the Triangle seems to inch closer and closer towards it.
Here is another Second Stage sequence from 5:56pm on 11/19/21 that shows the Orb to the right of the Sphere as the Triangle moves away from it.
I have taken many other sequences of photos over the last two years that show the Triangle behaving in a prescribed, purposeful manner in relation to the Sphere. The consistency from series to series indicates that the Triangular Craft is intelligently controlled and that it is working in conjunction with the Sphere.
And here is a third sequence of the Sphere brightening and the Triangle moving away taken at 6:31pm on 11/17/21, during the Second Stage.
COMING SOON…EPISODE 5:
THE MESSAGE WITHIN THE MEDIUM
On the evning of November 14th, 2021 I photographed something that to the best of my knowledge has never been photographed before. It contains imagery that was drawn into Storyboard Of A Dream weeks before, strategically placed above a portrait of Nicola Tesla. This same series of photographs prove conclusively that the Sphere is not a planet, and that the Triangular craft is solid, and not lens flare.
The Second and Third Stages of the nightly UAP ritual over my neighborhood during November, 2021 look like a combination of art and magic.
In the next series of installments, I will share these images with you.