Secret Base

We were thinking late last week that although we were posting lots of synchronicities here, we hadn’t experienced any for a few days. Well, that changed over the weekend. This one isn’t about numbers, it’s about letters, specifically, A-U-T-E-C.

Friday night a couple of friends came over for dinner. They’ve both taken yoga classes from me for years, but I didn’t t know much about their backgrounds. Paul and I were on the porch talking after dinner while Trish and Susan were in the kitchen. Paul asked me what I was working on and the conversation came around to an upcoming trip to Andros Island where I would be interviewed by the History Channel for an episode of UFO Hunter. Andros is the location of a secret navy base called AUTEC–the Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center. In some circles, AUTEC is known as the navy’s version of air force’s mysterious Area 51. Rumors about the base related to UFOs, especially underwater ones, known as USOs, will be part of the program.

Trish and I had been looking into getting onto the base during our stay on the island, but you need to know someone who works there in order to qualify for a tour. A peculiar requirement, and one that restricts access to a base that is already quite remote. While Andros is the largest island in the Bahamas, it’s mostly a mountainous wilderness with about 6,000 residents. Not many tourists go there.

So as I’m telling all this to Paul, he interrupts and says, “I used to work at AUTEC as a civilian contractor.” He’d no sooner made the comment when Trish burst onto the porch and said, “Guess what? Susan said Paul used to work at AUTEC.”

The next morning at the gym, I ran into Bruce Gernon, co-author of THE FOG, our book on the Bermuda Triangle. Nothing odd about that. I see him there a few times a week. Bruce is also headed to Andros to be interviewed for the same program in early April. He immediately told me that he was the local Flannigan’s the night before when he noticed that the man seated next to him at the bar was wearing a shirt with an emblem on it that said: AUTEC. He started a conversation and quickly found out that the man knew who he was and about the book. Since Bruce has appeared on many cable TV programs over the years about the Bermuda Triangle, that’s not too surprising. Bruce told him about our plans to go to Andros, and they talked about arranging a tour.

So with Andros on our upcoming itinerary, surprisingly, we both met people associated with AUTEC separately on the same evening.