Buster Keaton & the Church of Ufology

Here’s a strange synchro —aren’t they all?— sent to us by Dale Dassel, who lives in a small town in Georgia, not far from Warner-Robbins Air Force Base. Dale has alerted us to other synchros in the past and we first met him many years ago when he introduced himself as a big fan of my Indiana Jones novels. This story unfolded for him out of the blue, as synchronicities often do.

He was relaxing and watching Buster Keaton movies from the 1920s when, on a whim, he decided to Google search for UFO abductions in the 1920’s.  Once you do something like that, who knows what’s going to happen next. Here’s what did happen:

“I found an essay on The Church of Ufology blog which mentions an article you and Trish wrote in the 80’s…”

Dale goes on to quote from the article:

“In a 1984 article in ‘Fate’ magazine, authors Rob MacGregor and Trish Janeshutz recount an extremely bizarre and improbable tale occurring sometime in the year 1926 near the location of Ancud, southern Chile. Without going into any speculations I will present the following narrative from the article:

‘The 18-year old brother of Marcelino Zaldivia was sleeping one night on the porch when he disappeared and was not found until Easter week of 1976 when Marcelino, feeling nostalgic about his lost brother, visited their old home on the banks of the Rio Pudeto. There, seated in the living room and dressed as he’d been half a century earlier, was his brother, now old and evidently demented.
When Marcelino asked where he’d been all those years, the man replied only that he’d been on a ‘boat’ and implored him not to ask anything more. When a woman named Elena Vera Guerrero asked him about it, he shook his head and said, “They hear everything.”

I had never heard of this blog – Church of Ufology—so I was glad that Dale sent a link to the article.

Interestingly, we included this story in Aliens in the Backyard, but the UFO blogger apparently didn’t find it there. Instead, he quotes the 1984 article, our original story on the the ghost-ship Caleuche. Also, we made no mention of that article or the year it was published in Aliens. 

Another somewhat peculiar thing I noted as I wrote this post was that I quoted Dale, who quoted an article, which quoted another article – the one I wrote in FATE. So I was both at the beginning and the end that sequence. It’s almost like looking at reflections in a pair of angled mirrors. And I suppose at some point, I might refer to this post while writing another post, article, or book, adding to the string of references.

Notice Trish’s last name in the referenced article. We wrote that one shortly after we were married, but she was still writing under Janeshutz, her maiden name.

– Rob