Throughout the years of writing about synchronicity, we’ve heard from a number of people who have experienced what I call anomalistic weirdness. The experience usually changes their idea of what’s possible, often alters the course of their lives, and becomes a memory as indelible as India ink.
One January night in 2019, Joe Killian encountered what he believed to be an alien being in the parking lot of a restaurant.
In 2012, Canadian Charles Fontaine witnessed a UFO in his backyard and experienced a cascade of synchronicities related to that experience that we wrote about in our book Aliens in the Backyard: UFO Encounters, Abductions and Synchronicity. During this strange time in his life, Charles had an encounter while sitting in his car outside a grocery store, as a tall, ant-like creature came right toward him.
Joe says his experience left his questioning everything he thought he knew about the nature of reality. It took Charles nearly six years to recover from his experience.
Several years ago in the Florida Keys, Priscilla of Pembroke Pines drove through a dense fog and moved forward in time.
Her experience was eerily similar to that of Bruce Gernon, who in 1970 was flying his Cessna back to South Florida from Andros Island in the Bahamas and was surrounded by “electronic fog,” and moved forward in time. Bruce and Rob have written two books about the experience – The Fog and Beyond the Bermuda Triangle and Bruce has appeared on dozens of TV shows to talk about what happened that day.
In 1964, John Murphy was stationed aboard a U.S. Coast Guard cutter that docked near Pennos Wharf near St. George Bermuda and experienced the inexplicable – a kind of time travel love story. He believes he walked 300 years into the past with a young woman he had just met. Not only did John and Barbara both feel an uncanny sense that they already knew each other, but during a walk they encountered a small 18th century British village with a church dominating the village square where they felt certain they’d lived before. They even recalled their lives as young married couple with children. Yet, when John returned to this location alone two days later, the village was gone. He later learned the village had been wiped out in a hurricane in the late 18th century.
The important thing about these experiences is that the individuals involved recognized that the seemingly impossible had happened to them and it changed them in a fundamental way. John Murphy, who passed away in 2019, spent years looking for Barbara and finally found her. She remembered much of what had happened that night. We recounted his story in our book Beyond Strange. Bruce’s experience – when he was 24 – shaped the rest of his adult life.
Often, when people experience this anomalistic weirdness, they don’t talk about it with others, usually out of fear that they’ll sound nuts. But when Priscilla read about Joe’s experience, she asked us to give Joe her email and now they’ve had several conversations about their respective experiences. Joe says it has helped him wrap his head around what happened to him. Charles Fontaine offered to communicate with Joe as well.
Synchronicity of one kind or another was involved in all of these experiences. I’ve come to think of these types of synchros as mind-blowing and life-altering precisely because they are so beyond strange and prompt us to question the nature of our personal and collective reality.
