Weird scenes, and a gem on a brow

I've just read Paola Harris's Conversations with Colonel Corso. I quoted it in my November 2025 post "He's got a whole new world in his hands" after searching for a source for the "new world if you can take it" line, which I knew only third-hand from Whitley and others, but I didn't get around to reading the whole thing until a couple of days ago. In that post, I commented:

The fact that the offer of "a new word" takes place "in a gold mine" is also synchronistically interesting. The title of the book I've just finished reading, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon, is apparently a reference to "weird scenes inside the gold mine," a line from the Doors song "The End."

Now that I've actually read the book, I know that the gold mine in which the Colonel encountered the alien was in Red Canyon, New Mexico. So that weird scene was inside both a gold mine and a canyon.

The book also includes this drawing by the Colonel of the entity he encountered there. Notice the distinctive headband it is wearing.

In the book, it is explained that this "silver-like" headband had "a stone in the middle of it, an interface."

This put me in mind of Tolkienian imagery -- Eärendil, the spacefaring Mariner with the Silmaril "bound upon his brow" -- and sure enough, the day after I finished Conversations with Colonel Corso, I read in Words of Them Which Have Slumbered of Dior dying with "the gem yet upon his brow." I don't think either Tolkien or Daymon makes explicit how the gem was thus bound, but one readily imagines a headband of "silver-like" mithril. Many UFO writers, most notably Jacques Vallée, have taken an interest in parallels between their field and that of elf and fairy lore.

The gem on Eärendil's brow was the Morning Star, Venus, which Bill recently brought up in comments on "Island Pharaohs again, twice."