This evening when we were on The Light Gate podcast, hosted by Preston Dennett and Dolly Saffron,Rob started a story about an abductee we knew back in the early 1990s. It reminded me that the story has a great synchronicity attached to it.
I don’t remember how we met Don Estrella. But I do recall his abduction story. It was a Halloween night back in the early 1970s. Don and a friend had donned costumes- adults pretending to be kids. But at some point, he found himself in a line of others in Halloween costumes, waiting in front of a huge UFO. I remember Don described it as feeling like a dream, yet he knew it wasn’t. That night, Don was abducted.
First synchronicity: Don’s last name, in Spanish, means star.
Don had never been regressed to find out what actually happened that Halloween night. But said he would like to be. All he remembered from that night was the costumes, the UFO, the sense of dread in the pit of his stomach. Rob contacted a psychiatrist who lived up the coast in Vero Beach – Berthold Schwartz -and made an appointment for Don.
Second synchro: His name seemed familiar to me, but I couldn’t place it until Rob mentioned that Schwartz was also an author who had written about the paranormal.
When I was 18, a freshman at Utica College, then part of Syracuse University, one of my close friends was Carolyn “Cookie” Sayre from Montclair, New Jersey. She was interested in the same paranormal weird stuff that I was.
That Thanksgiving, she invited me to her home for Thanksgiving. “Home” was a gorgeous mansion in Montclair. When I first entered this beauty, my attention was drawn immediately to a huge library off to my left. Cookie noticed my interest and nodded toward it. “C’mon, the library. You’ll love it.”
The only other place where I’ve seen such an array of books on the paranormal was in the Skywalker Ranch library, when Rob was writing the novelization of The Last Crusade. But that’s another story. As I drew my finger along the spines of books in the Sayre library, I ran across a book called, A Psychiatrist Looks at ESP by Berthold Schwartz. I asked Cookie if I could read it over Thanksgiving.
“Sure.” She popped it off the shelf and handed it to me. I devoured it in two days.
When we met Schwartz the day we drove Don to Vero Beach for his appointment, I told him about finding his book in the Sayre family library and how it launched my exploration of the paranormal. His reply indicated that he was well versed in Jung and synchronicity: “That kind of thing happens to me a lot. I’m glad it was helpful.”
Schwartz later told us that Don broke down weeping during the regression, that his abduction had been shattering for him. Don once worked for NASA on the space program and quit after the Challenger exploded on January 28, 1986.
So here’s an example of a synchronicity that came full circle about 30 years after I first came across Schwartz’s book. If he were still alive, he would be a guest on our podcast, The Mystical Underground. It’s where he lived.