Welcome to The Mystical Underground

Sometimes, skeptics and debunkers can go buggy in their attempts to dismiss UFO sightings. That was literally the case when seven cameras recorded the flight of  several UFOs at an air show in Chile as the craft darted around a formation of jets. The object was recorded from seven different angles and positions. So it was hard to dismiss.

Yet, dismissed it was by skeptics who boastfully said it was a bug – probably a beetle flying in front of the camera. The skeptics had looked at only one video when the pronouncement was made. The skeptics apparently had no expertise in examining digital images.

But others did. One Chilean analyst, Alberto Vergara, an expert in digital imaging, reported: “When we examine the whole scene frame by frame, we have been able to realize that [the object] has, apparently, moved at a speed far superior to any flying object of known manufacture. Therefore it is worthy of continuing to investigate its origin.”

Meanwhile Leslie Kean, author of  UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record decided to test the skeptics’ theory and send one of the videos, as well as still shots, to three prominent American entomologists, hopefully with a knowledge of Chilean bugs.

All three said it wasn’t a bug. “No idea what it is, but it does not seem to be an insect . . . altho very fast flying insects captured on slow shutter speeds do look like amorphous blurs or blobs. I am forwarding these to several colleagues and asking around,” wrote Brett C. Ratcliffe, professor and curator at the University of Nebraska State Museum and Department of Entomology.

A few days later, he wrote back. “I have queried several of my colleagues to see if anyone might have thought an insect could be responsible for the anomaly in the images. No one had any idea of what could have caused that.”

Kean went on to find an expert in Chilean insects and sent the same material. “When Beetles fly, their wings stand up, and the membranous wings that are under are flapping.  I have seen insects flying many times and their photo looks like a torpedo, is more oval, and that is why I can not see or imagine where the legs and wings could be.” She then said she would think about this further. Her description of typical beetle photos sounded a lot like the three images shown above. She ended her comment saying, “I would say they were not insects.”

So who was acting more scientific in this investigation – the skeptics or the believers? Take a look for yourself at the video…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsugEQIRkGQ

Could it be that the appearance of UFOs at an air show was intentional? A means of appearing before multiple cameras, and to keep us guessing?

Synchronicity occurs under many conditions. But one environment that seems to attract meaningful coincidence is when you are focused on something to the extent that almost everything else disappears from your awareness. That was the case recently for David Wilson, publisher of Crossroad Press, when he was working on a fantasy novel called Nevermore.  In the novel, his main character takes two other characters on a vision ride to the past, where they see Edgar Allan Poe and Lenore.

Writes David: “Edgar travels with a crow named Grimm (after the brothers) and we learn his stories come in dreams and visions – he’s a mage, Grimm the familiar, but he has no magic to help his dying bride, Virginia.  Lenore is an artist.  She sees faces and people in trees, rocks, water, etc.  She draws what she sees, then painstakingly removes whatever traps the faces / people and frees them to move on to whatever is next.

“The point is that Poe theoretically MAY have written the first draft of The Raven at a roadhouse that used to sit on the border of NC and VA  – which is where they all meet. For some reason I look at GRIMM’S FAIRY TALES…and find they wrote a tale called “The Raven” – in which a young girl is imprisoned in the form of a raven by her foolish mother…and needs to be freed…”

Synchronicity. David told me the story because he knows about this blog and because I’ve laid a couple of strange synchros on him in e-mails – most recently about  how I had ‘coincidentally’ come in contact with the owners of two full-sized crystal skulls at the time when I was looking for royalty-free photos of crystal skulls for the book cover of my novel by the same name that David was publishing.

What David didn’t know, though, was that years ago I had written a novel called Romancing the Raven that involved the main character traveling back in time and meeting Poe.

This object, photographed by an amateur astronomer, is truly strange.

Here’s a synchro from Gabe Carlson (aka Max) of Minneapolis that adds to his earlier mind-boggling synchronicity that involved  a pair of identical teapots that mysteriously came together in his life. Apparently, the nature of reality is still steeping in Gabe’s unconscious mind.

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Today four of us went to the thrift store for the first time in many months. On the way there, discussing the pros and cons of different store options,  I loudly declared that I was going to find another magic teapot. I guess I had no expectation that I really was going to find a teapot, but maybe was hoping that I’d find something serendipitous and synchronistic – thrift stores are often good for that, with their dense assortment of randomness.

I’d already forgotten my pronouncement by the time we arrived, but still headed to the kitchen section first, thinking that my girlfriend Kristin might want to browse for something useful for her canning/cooking/pickling.

Of course, that was the section were teapots are found, and where I’d bought one of the original two.

Before I could even start down the kitchen aisle, Kristin suggested that we head down further to look at the furniture. So we did. We ‘d been in the store for maybe three minutes when she pointed out the first item of interest – a series of square boards connected by strapping, to be used as some kind of hanging shelf unit.

When Kristin pulled it off the shelf to examine it, letting it hang down to the floor, I happened to notice the back of a pin on one of the straps. There was just one – somebody had once stuck a single decorative pin into the strapping. But the way it was hanging, I couldn’t see the front of it.

After asking her a few times what it was (she had no idea what I was referring to) I managed to get hold of the strap, and twist it around so we could both see … the silvery teapot shining there.

We both started laughing, mores o when we remembered that I’d actually announced that I was going to find a magic teapot today.

Needless to say, that alone made the entire trip more than worthwhile. I didn’t even look very hard for anything else, since I’d found what I’d been looking for, right off the bat – yet another wink, another nudge, another confirmation of all the weird and seemingly irrational things I’ve found myself increasingly daring to believe since my mystical experience 7 years ago.

I’m still not sure what it means … but it certainly makes things a lot more interesting. Gabe’s blog is called Teapots Happen.

A post-script: Gabe followed up a few days later with this comment.

Oh! and I forgot to mention something cool about the teapot pin.

My girlfriend Kristin was one of the friends I was with at the thrift store when I found the first of my two teapots in 2006. In fact, she was the main person I kept coming up to, trying to understand why I was so compelled to buy the rather utilitarian-looking but nonfunctional teapot.

She’d quite sensibly advised me not to buy it, but I did anyway. So, it was an extra awesome synchronicity to not only accidentally find a teapot after declaring my intention to do so – but to find it with her, stuck onto an object she’d chosen … and at a Unique Thrift Store, just like 2006.

Fantastic! The astrologers were wrong about the long term repercussions – Obama won tonight – not weeks from now.It was a dicier election, a tougher route to re-eleciton, but…

…the astrologers, I think, were right about the long lines, attempts at voter suppression, voter purging, and attempts by republican governors like Rick Scott of Florida to shorten early voting days. It’s an instance where the collective will of the people overcame everything else.

Onward….

I wrote this book during my pregnancy in 1989. Ballantine gave it the absolutely most grotesque cover ever. The premise of the story is based on Rupert Sheldrake’s book, Presence of the Past, in which he introduced his theory of morphic resonance – that nature has a memory.

Ballantine labeled the novel “horror,” and while there are certainly elements of that, it’s actually  a story about what happens to ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. The cover didn’t do much for the sales of the book, which was published in 1990 and went out of print a few years later.

When I got the rights back to the book some years ago, the rights reversion letter sat in a file. There are 20 or so back list titles in that reversion letter and now, with the advent of ebooks and e-readers, I’m bringing those titles into digital form, one by one, and I’m using my own name. What a concept! Talented Katrina Joyner did the superb cover:

With this one, I’m trying Amazon’s Kindle select program, where the book is available exclusively on Amazon for 90 days and is included in Amazon’s lending library.  In this program, the author earns according to how many times the book is borrowed.  It’s also available for a traditional sale, at $3.99.

An article in Forbes Magazine talks about the impact of this program on traditional publishing. Two weeks earlier, the author of the Forbes article wrote this piece on how traditional publishing is broken and quoted author Sue Grafton, who has had 32 bestsellers, from an interview she did for LouisevilleKY.com:

“To me, it seems disrespectful…that a ‘wannabe’ assumes it’s all so easy s/he can put out a ‘published novel’ without bothering to read, study, or do the research. … Self-publishing is a short cut and I don’t believe in short cuts when it comes to the arts. I compare self-publishing to a student managing to conquer Five Easy Pieces on the piano and then wondering if s/he’s ready to be booked into Carnegie Hall.”

Personally, I think the explosion of ebooks and indie books is fantastic. Writers suddenly have multiple venues that didn’t exist before and readers have more books to choose from. How can that be a bad thing? It’s all a huge, exciting experiment now.  It will be interesting to see how it all shakes out.

Christopher Lutz is a man who spent decades trying to escape the ghosts of his past. In his case, those ghosts were really ghosts…or at least some of them were, he says.

Lutz lived as a child in one of America’s most famous haunted houses — the ‘Amityville Horror’ House. It’s also the most commercially exploited haunted house of all time – several movies, documentaries and books.

Christopher Lutz changed his last name years ago to escape his past. But now he’s talking publicly–at least to FOX News–(using his former name) and separating his real home from the public image of the infamous haunted house. In other words, he’s separating fact from fiction, and says that much of what was depicted in film and in books was not real.

After 37 years, he remains haunted by chilling events that broke out in his home in 1975. But he’s also annoyed by the way Hollywood spun the story out of control.

“What the public was sold is not what happened. What really happened in that house is quite different from what people have been told all these years,” Lutz said.

Lutz said the book — billed as a true story — exaggerated the facts. By the time Hollywood dealt with the story, the story became ‘based on a true story’–in other much of it was fabricated. For example, there was no demon that took the form of a giant squealing pig.

Lutz maintains that the haunting was genuine. The story was not a hoax, as some have maintained. But it was nothing like the Hollywood version.He said unexplained phenomena in the house terrified him. “An apparition manifested just outside my bedroom door. It scared the crap out of me as a little kid,” Lutz said.

“This is something that happened to me as a kid that I would rather have forgotten about. Unfortunately, the way this was made public, I haven’t had the opportunity to leave it behind.”

Some blame the haunting on a mass murder in that home before his family moved there. But Lutz said his stepfather, George Lutz, was dabbling in the occult — reciting the names of demons after the family moved into the home.

“Had he done that in any other house — that wouldn’t have been an issue. But to do it in that house, that to me is what triggered events there,” Lutz said.

“There’s a lot of people that deal with the paranormal in their own homes. I believe this may provide answers for them as they search to find out what’s on the other side.”