French village which will 'survive 2012 Armageddon' plagued by visitors

dannybananny

Jedi Council Member
The mayor of a picturesque French village has threatened to call in the army to seal it off from a tide of New Age fanatics and UFO watchers, who are convinced it is the only place on Earth to be spared Armageddon in 2012.
Bugarach, population 189, is a peaceful farming village in the Aude region, southwestern France and sits at the foot of the Pic de Bugarach, the highest mountain in the Corbières wine-growing area.

But in the past few months, the quiet village has been inundated by groups of esoteric outsiders who believe the peak is an "alien garage".

According to them, extraterrestrials are quietly waiting in a massive cavity beneath the rock for the world to end, at which point they will leave, taking, it is hoped, a lucky few humans with them.

Most believe Armageddon will take place on December 21, 2012, the end date of the ancient Maya calendar, at which point they predict human civilisation will come to an end. Another favourite date mentioned is 12, December, 2012. They see Bugarach as one of perhaps several "sacred mountains" sheltered from the cataclysm.

"This is no laughing matter," Jean-Pierre Delord, the mayor, told The Daily Telegraph.
"If tomorrow 10,000 people turn up, as a village of 200 people we will not be able to cope. I have informed the regional authorities of our concerns and want the army to be at hand if necessary come December 2012."

Mr Delord said people had been coming to the village for the past 10 years or so in search of alien life following a post in an UFO review by a local man, who has since died. "He claimed he had seen aliens and heard the humming of their spacecraft under the mountain," he said.

The internet abounds with tales of the late President François Mitterrand being curiously heliported on to the peak, of mysterious digs conducted by the Nazis and later Mossad, the Israeli secret services.

A visit to Bugarach is said to have inspired Steven Spielberg in his film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind – although the actual mountain he used is Devil's Tower in Wyoming. It is also where Jules Verne found the entrance and the inspiration for A Journey to the Centre of the Earth.

Recently, however, interest in the site had skyrocketed, said the mayor, with online UFO websites, many in the US, advising people to seek shelter in Bugarach as the countdown to Armageddon commences.

"Many come and pray on the mountainside. I've even seen one man doing some ritual totally nude up there," said Mr Delord.

Sigrid Benard, who runs the Maison de la Nature guesthouse, said UFO tourists were taking over. "At first, my clientele was 72 per cent ramblers. Today, I have 68 per cent 'esoteric visitors'," he said.

Several "Ufologists" have bought up properties in the small hamlet of Le Linas, in the mountain's shadow for "extortionate" prices, and locals have complained they are being priced out of the market. Strange sect-like courses are held for up to €800 a week. "For this price, you are introduced to a guru, made to go on a procession, offered a christening and other rubbish, all payable in cash," said Mr Delord.

Valerie Austin, a retired Briton from Newcastle who settled in Bugarach 22 years ago who said the alien watchers were spoiling the village atmosphere.

"You can't go for a peaceful walk anymore. It's a beautiful area, but now you find people chanting lying around meditating. Everybody has the right to their own beliefs, but the place no longer feels like ours." She said alien watchers planted strange objects on the mountainside.

Recently she found a black virgin statuette cemented to the rock face.

Although she described the alien claims as "total rubbish", she said there was nevertheless something special about the place.

"It has a magnetic force in the scientific sense of the word. There is a special feeling here, but if I really believed the world were about to end, I'd have a whale of a time over the next two years" rather than look for salvation, she said.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/ufo/8217001/French-village-which-will-survive-2012-Armageddon-plagued-by-visitors.html
 
The local myths and legends concerning the mountain are mostly about a guy named Daniel Bettex who died in, on or around the mountain while supposedly searching for the ark of the covenant.

http://www.rlcresearch.com/2007/11/21/daniel-bettex/

The story of Daniel Bettex is, interwoven with the mountain of Bugarach. Bettex, was a Swiss security officer at Geneva airport during his professional life. In his free time he researched the Medieval Cathar tragedy. Bettex was in close contact with the Societé du Souvenir et des Etudes Cathares, the French Society of Cathar Research. His correspondence with Déodat Roché, the founder of the society, in whose former house in Arques it now has a museum,, led him to a number of locations on mount Bugarach. Roché (who was related to the Dr. Roché that supplied Saunière with fake medical statements so he wouldn’t have to show up in court), stated that few had yet researched the mountain and felt it was time someone took up the glove., Bettex started his research, aided, by Lucienne Julien, secretary of the society.

Starting point was the document mémoire sur la mythologie appliquée au Pech de Thauze (memory of the mythology of the Pech the Thauze, the old name for Bugarach). This document, beheld an overview of the legends and mythical writings about Bugarach from original 15th century sources. Many of the legends, like the story of Agartha, dealt with an underground entrance or cave system of some sort. Bettex decided to start looking for an entrance to the underground mythical world. In his notes he speaks of the tradition of a hidden opening, leading to a waterway with a quay. From this quay you would be able to travel deeper into the mountain.

Many writers, of whom some quite illustrous ones have written about Bugarach and an underground world beneath. Maurice Leblanc, Gaston Leroux, George Sand, Andre Malraux, Louis Fédié, Henri Boudet, Daniel Réju, Serge Hutin, Luc Alberny, Jules Verne, to quote just a number of a much longer list. Verne, in his book Clovis Dardentor, talked about a secret entrance that led to an underground world were a mythical race lived. Bettex was intrigued by the many similarities in the stories old and new by authors, many of whom were members of secret rosicrucianist societies.

Bettex never disclosed where exactly he did his research. Allegedly as a pretense to gather the necessary equipment he excavated the old castle of Bugarach. After his death, the floors of the castle in Bugarach were filled with rumble and sealed with concrete. He appears to have found cavities in the mountain in which he found graffiti of what he claimed was the Ark of the Covenant on a sled. Bettex made lifesize reproductions of these. The photographs and notes he made have survived. It was actually whispered that Bettex had located he Ark and had been called by the Israelian general Moshe Dayan who warned him for its powers.

In his correspondence with Julien he claimed he would soon make a fabulous discovery. The only thing we know for fact is that he indicated to Julien that he thought that there was a connection between the inexplicable graffiti, the remains of a hearth and the beginning of a mining installation whose collapse had appeared to be done intentionally.

In 1988 Bettex, who was normally a calm and composed man, was all excited and told Lucienne he was almost at the end of his search. At most, four or five days separated him from the final goal. He told he’d be back within a week, carrying part of a treasure. He told her "You will be immensely rich!".

Three days later he was found dead inside or close to the mountain. It is unknow where exactly he was found or what the cause was. Some say he died in a collapsed gallery in the mountain, others say he managed to crawl back to the village where he died of a heart attack.

http://www.perillos.com/bugarach1.html - basically the same article with a bit more information and some less popular myths.

Curiously, when you type in Bugarach in the search bar here at the forum the only other thread with the word is about Maitre Philippe of Lyon, a great healer and sometimes profit of the 19th - 20th century.


From February 1905 onwards, Philippe’s personal health deteriorated; he could no longer leave his home and when his predicted time of death came, he apparently stood up from his chair (those in the room not noticing as they were distracted by a noise outside), and collapsed on the floor, dead, apparently without a sound.

Two years before, in February 1903, he had begun to make preparations for his departure, saying farewell to his inner circle, telling them that Jean Chapas would continue once he had departed. And, indeed, Chapas held séances until his own death in 1932.
Chapas was but one of a series of disciples, which also included Jean Leloup (Paul Sedir), Cyril Scott, as well as Jean de Rignies – even though the latter was only born in 1917 (he died in 2001). De Rignies, who was related to Papus, said that one day, the voice of “Master Philippe” manifested himself in his spirit. De Rignies said that the manifestation was an awakening, the beginning of a quest, in which he had to find a lost valley with a spring, the traces of an old castle, an abbey, somewhere in the Aude region, and not far from Rennes-le-Château. In the end, he would find this location, in what is now known as the Domaine de la Salz, high in the hills above Rennes-les-Bains, near that magical mountain Bugarach. Why he should come here, has never been communicated; perhaps Philippe had a plan?

With these stories added to the fact that many people seem to think it's a save zone from the end of the world this place get's pretty strange. I personally don't know what to think about it. Maybe a question for the C's?
 
I've been up on Mt. Bugarach and it's a creepy place.
 
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