This video is interesting for a number of reasons. It’s longer than most videos of alleged UFOs- over 7 minutes – and the voice of the man taking the video and the voices of others around him – suggest it’s exactly what it looks like. Lights above a hotel in Charlotte, NC that flit around and form geometric patterns. A mystery. Sometimes, the lights are too high up to see. But in a few spots in this video, they’re clear. Whitley Strieber gives this one an A.
Eleven years ago, Bruce Gernon and I (Rob) wrote THE FOG, a book about the Bermuda Triangle, based on Bruce’s experiences as a pilot. Since his major, life-changing experience in 1971, Bruce has appeared on 36 Bermuda Triangle documentaries that have appeared on cable, network and BBC channels. Over time, Bruce has realized that there is no Bermuda Triangle, per se, but anomalous phenomena related to fog and usually storm conditions that exists anywhere these condition appear. So we are writing a second book, Beyond the Bermuda Triangle: Ture Encounters with Electronic Fog, Missing Aircraft, and Time Warps.
Here’s a brief excerpt, a story about an officer with the British Royal Air Force in England who encountered the fog in 1935 on a flight in Scotland, and would never forgot what happened. The story was originally told in a chapter of Flight Toward Reality, by Sir Victor Goddard.
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One weekend, four years before England entered World War II, Wing Commander Victor Goddard flew a Hawker Hart biplane to Edinburgh from his home base in Andover, England. On Sunday, the day before his return flight, Goddard flew over an abandoned airfield in Drem, near Edinburgh. Foliage had overtaken most of the field and cattle roamed about. The tarmac and four hangars were in disrepair. The property was a farm, no longer an airfield.
The next day, in spite of stormy weather, Goddard took off on his return flight. He followed the same route that would lead him over Drem again. But with the low clouds and heavy rain, he didn’t expect to see the abandoned airfield. To make matters worse, Goddard was flying in an open cockpit over rugged terrain with no radio navigation support or modern instruments to guide him.
Torrential rain stung his forehead and dripped over his goggles. He climbed to 8,000 feet in the hope of flying above the storm, but couldn’t find any break in the dense cloud cover. With no horizon visible, the nose of the biplane dipped too low and the plane slipped into a death spiral, falling from the sky. He struggled with the controls, but couldn’t pull out of the spin.
The sky darkened, the rain pounded, and the clouds turned yellowish. Goddard was dropping rapidly at 150 miles per hour. His altimeter revealed he was just a thousand feet above the ground, then when he was at two hundred feet, he glimpsed daylight. He emerged from the clouds and was plunging toward water that he recognized as the Firth of Forth.
Somehow, he managed to pull out of the spin at the last moment. He was flying at twenty feet when he saw a young girl with a baby carriage running through the pouring rain. She ducked to avoid his wing and he barely cleared a stonewall. He flew along the beach, his view obscured by the fog. He turned away from the water and glimpsed the black silhouettes of the Drem Airfield hangars ahead of him.
The sky remained dark, the downpour heavy, and his plane began to shake. Flying several feet above the ground, the hangars loomed in front of him. Suddenly, the rain stopped and the was shining. The hangars and airstrip now appeared in new condition, and the cattle were gone. He could see mechanics by four yellow planes near the end of the runway. One of the crafts was a monoplane unlike anything in the Royal Air Force. The airplane mechanics wore blue overalls. But RAF mechanics only wore brown overalls.
He passed over the airport just high enough to clear the hangars, but none of the mechanics reacted, as if they didn’t see or hear him. As he left the airfield behind, he was swallowed by the storm again. This time he flew up to 17,000 feet, and briefly up to 21,000 feet to avoid the storm, and made his way safely back to the base.
When he told several officers about his eerie flight, they reacted as if he’d lost him mind. So he didn’t say anything more, fearing that he would be grounded or discharged from the RAF.
In 1939, Goddard’s vision began to materialize as he saw RAF training planes painted yellow, mechanics switching to blue overalls, and a new monoplane—the Magister—just like the one he witnessed four years earlier. He also found out that, with the threat of war that was about to be declared, the airfield at Drem had been refurbished.
What particularly fascinated me about Goddard was that in the aftermath, he did the same thing I did. He replayed the experience over and over again in his mind for the next twenty-seven years. Finally, in 1966, he wrote about the experience. He had become convinced that there was no way he could possibly have known four years in advance that the color of the trainer planes and the overalls of the mechanics would change. He concluded that he had briefly glimpsed the future or traveled into it just as I concluded years ago that I had instantly leaped ahead 100 miles after flying through the tunnel vortex of the storm.
We own three Mazdas. The oldest one belonged to my dad , who died in 2005, and it became our daughter’s car. It saw her through college and her last four years in Orlando. It has 127,000 miles on it, a huge dent on the left side from a meet and greet at a gas station with a concrete block, and the right side mirror is gone, snapped off in some other mishap. We own a 2008 CX-7 and a 2008 Mazda 3, both used cars that are paid for.
Two days after the election, I drove up to Orlando in the Mazda 3 to help Megan with Wine Walk. These events are always fun and this time, helped me to overcome the PTSD and grief I felt about the election. It’s Orlando’s monthly event where people set up exhibits to sell art, jewelry, massages, photos, and whatever to people who pay 10 bucks to do the walk and drink all they want at the various restaurants and bars along the route. Megan sets up at a dog bakery, so she has a built-in audience for her pet portraits.
I drove my car, the Mazda 3, which I named Synchronicity the day we bought it eight years ago. Megan’s car was in such bad shape that I ended up leaving her my car and drove hers back home. I felt her car was no longer safe to drive. Two days later, Rob and I drove that car to a Mazda dealer 15 miles south, in Delray, in search of a Mazda to buy or lease.
Car dealerships are not where I typically choose to spend my Sundays or any other day of the week. But this experience was fascinating from start to finish. Our sales person was a guy from Queens, an ex-cop who’d gotten caught up in a drug sting with some Mafia dudes and ended up doing six years in a federal facility. He knew some of the people for whom we’ve ghostwritten books over the years. He also knew a lot about cars and affirmed our original intent: to lease rather than buy. I asked him what he thought about the election and he made a sour face, then shrugged.
“Scary, but we’ll see.”
During our test drive of the car, I asked if we could stop somewhere so I could get a bite to eat for lunch. He got a kick out of that. “Well, this is a first,” he said, and directed me to a place that had great barbecue chicken sandwiches.
We got a $500 trade-in value for Megan’s car, about what we expected, and many hours later, ended up in the business manager’s office to seal the deal. Herb, a Jamaican, was a total delight. We talked at some length about the election – his shock and angst, that he’d hardly slept since election night, and how it had divided his family. But Herb had faith that something good would come of all this and I marveled at that.
Our sales guy took us through the paces of the technology in our new lease. Keyless. Bluetooth. Sirius radio. Built-in GPS with maps. Blind spot sensors. Backup vision that shows what’s behind you. For those of you with new cars, this is probably laughable. But hey, we’ve been driving eight-year-old cars that have none of this, cars so different they’re comparable to the early Radio Shack computers with only external drive versus the newest Mac computers.
Off we headed for home, fiddling with the radio, entertainment, Bluetooth and navigation, and with this keyless thing. “Hey, do you have the main key?” Rob asked.
I didn’t. I had the spare our sales guy had handed me that had a little metal thing attached that held the key code in the event we lost the main key. “You must have it.”
Rob swore that he didn’t. He repeatedly emptied his pockets. I emptied my purse several times. Nothing. Herb had told us these keys cost $400 and had asked if we wanted to buy insurance to cover the loss of a key and a bunch of other stuff. We had opted out. I was now had some doubts about the whole thing. Rob called our sales guy, asking if he maybe had the key. He didn’t.
When we got home, I dumped everything out of my purse, searched every nook and cranny, every zippered compartment. The only key I had was the one with the metal tag on it. Rob and I kept going over the events in the parking lot when we’d been going through the techno stuff on the car. I didn’t remember ever seeing the main key. And yet, I when I went through my bag again, I found it tucked into one of the crannies I know was empty before.
Trickster? Had it gone the same place socks go in the dryer and been returned?
The next day, I got a call from Herb. The date on the final papers was for last month and could he stop by our place with new papers, with the right dates?
Here’s where it got really strange. Herb arrived and for the next 90 minutes, the three of us connected on the level where Rob and I live most of the time. Some years ago during surgery, Herb died. When he was revived, he began having vivid, precognitive dreams. In three of these dreams, he saw numbers that he played in the lottery and won. The largest, several years ago, was more than two hundred grand.
But the lottery wins are just part of a much larger picture for him. “My life has been weird,” he said. “No one believes me when I tell them about the dreams I have, so I always call my daughter the day after so that someone else knows about it.” Then when the event unfolds, his daughter acts as his verification, his record.
I wished we’d met Herb while we were writing Sensing the Future. We’re going to get together with him and his kids in December, when they visit, and we’re eager to hear more of his experiences. His parting words? “Now I understand why the date on the these papers was wrong. You guys made my evening!”
And he made ours.
Yes, I love my new leased car. We named it White Crows Tulpas, after our respective novels now making the rounds.
I’ve been going through my old blackberry photos and found this pic of a comical and insightful sign that was taken in Cassadaga, Florida. I mean, seriously, it sort of says it all.
Another good one, also in Cassadaga:
On our most recent trip, we finally visited Cassadaga cemetery and happened across the grave of the town’s founder, George Colby. Just a regular grave, nondescript:
Recently, I was scrolling back through more than seven years of blog posts, looking for my top 10 or 20 favorites. I decided that we’ll be posting our top favorites and will be delighted to send you a token of our appreciation.
As I went scrolled through these, I was shocked by how many powerful synchros are recorded here and how many more are embedded in the 30,000 plus comments.
Then I found this one from Ray Getzinger. I love it because it’s so simple, personal and profoundly precognitive in how it played out in Ray’s life. I think it also illustrates the importance of dreams, the roles they play in our lives, the information they can reveal.
From Ray:
When I was twelve years old I used to dream about a red headed woman from Georgia with her hair up in ringlets. Ten year later, in 1966, I married a woman with red hair. She lived in Virginia, but was born in Georgia where her father was in the same Army Air Force squadron as Gene Autry during WW II. Before we had been married a year she styled her hair exactly as I had dreamed.
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I’ve known Ray for a long time, even though we have never met in person. He met me through my first novel, In Shadow, published in 1985, and at some point in the years since, we started corresponding. Then became Facebook friends. Followed each other on Twitter. Then he started posting on our blog. We exchange emails from time to time. He understands synchronicity because he lives it.
Thank you, Ray. And since your synchro is the first, what can I send you? A natal chart on a grandchild? Signed books? Three years of monthly predictions for your sign? Let me know!
Between 1952-1958, a man named Marcos Perez Jimenez was dictator of Venezuela, where I was born and lived at the time. He’s the dude in the image above. I still need to track down this issue of Time and find out why he was worthy of the cover.
Even as a kid, I remember seeing this man with the plump face on what passed as television at the time. I remember wondering who he was and why anyone would bother listening to this very boring person.
I was too young to understand that he sat on one of the largest oil reserves in the world- note all the oil derricks in the background of the cover image. Creole, the company where my dad worked as an accountant, was a subsidiary of Standard Oil, which was tapping into that gold. In fairness to Standard Oil, they built the rigs that drilled for that oil and the infrastructure that made the country uber wealthy for decades. But Standard Oil and companies from other countries were also incredibly invasive.
At one time, there were 8,000 Americans living in Venezuela, many more thousands from other countries who had established oil companies in Venezuela, and all of them had created “camps” (neighborhoods) where the families of their employees lived. They established clinics and hospitals for their employees. They basically took over the country in terms of profits. Back then, I didn’t really understand what that meant. I went to school, I had friends and a wonderful family life, pets, a sister, Christmas, summer vacations. I went to an American school with a cool library.
Our life was good, prosperous, fascinating. We lived in a second floor apartment in the Las Mercedes neighborhood of Caracas that faced the mountains. Directly across the street from us from a river contained by cement walls that was actually more of a sewage ditch. In retrospect, crime under the dictatorship was relatively low. Under Perez Jimenez, the country prospered, the poor who lives in ranchitos – shacks- along the mountainside had enough to eat and some even had TVs and cars.
Now and then, we had days off from school when a revolution was imminent, when the rebellious factions of the military and other facets of the governments threatened to overthrow the Jimenez dictatorship. I remember my mother and I rushing to the auto mercado to buy supplies, not unlike what we I do now when a hurricane is imminent – and finding the shelves bare. What I didn’t realize then was that Jimenez was constantly confronted with opposing factions in the populace and that he, like other dictators throughout history, had secret police who hunted down and imprisoned anyone who opposed his policies.
The revolution didn’t happen until one night in January 1958, when I was nearly eleven. My mother came running into the room I shared with my sister and woke us. “You have to see this,” she said. “The dictator is fleeing the country.”
We leaped out of bed and hurried out to the front porch where my dad was. In the distance, along the autopista- the highway that led through Caracas down 3,000 feet to the port and airport – was a line of cars, headlights burning through the darkness. Jimenez and his entourage were leaving the country with, we later learned, $13 million they’d embezzled from the government.
And the one clear thought I had from that night, as I stood on our porch watching history, was that a way of life was ending for me and my family and it wouldn’t be long before we, too, would be leaving this country. And we did, in 1963, when the Venezuelan government nationalized the oil industry and pretty much kicked out the American companies that had helped build and integrate the lucrative oil industry into the Venezuelan economy.
In the decades since, Venezuela has enjoyed booms and busts. Right now, it’s a crippled country where people are hungry, there’s a scarcity of everything, the valley is horribly polluted, and life is pretty grim.
In a Trump presidency, this same reality may come to pass. The parameters and specifics may be different, but the secret police, the censorship, the greed, could easily unfold. He does share, after all, certain attributes with Hitler. When I put this on Facebook, the vitriol was incredible – and sad.
But the world now is not the world as it was during WWII and the world of the 1950s and 60s is drastically changed from what the world is today, in the second decade of the twenty-first century. We have nearly instantaneous access to information with videos and photos and hundreds of thousands of apps that capitalize on this. I often wonder if Steve Jobs understood the magnitude of what became possible when Apple issued the iPhone in 2007 and that beautiful phone came with a camera and video capabilities.
The day after the election, Rob and I were running errands and happened to be behind a truck with a trickster message on the back of it:
No matter where we are, what we’re doing, our phones are powerful tools that enable us to document the small and large moments in our lives. And these moments come through all the social media and record those moments about the tectonic changes happening in the larger world.
Frankly, I don’t think a dictator has a prayer in this 21st century America. But when I look at the people Trump is appointing to his cabinet… I invariably think that Costa Rica looks better by the second. They love Americans. And in case Paul Ryan makes good on his promise to eradicate Medicare, Medicaid and privatize Social Security, Costa Rica has a universal health care system that works and is inexpensive. And we can write anywhere.
But my hope is that it doesn’t come to that. My hope is that even though the electoral college voted in a man whose platform is about racism, isolationism, hatred of women and anyone else who isn’t a white male, that our more evolved selves will prevail.
Hummingbirds. Hold onto that thought for a moment.
Stephen Mitchel, writing in The Enlightened Mind, refers to Indra’s Net as a “profound and subtle metaphor for the structure of reality.” He asks us to imagine a vast net that at every crossing point features a jewel. Each jewel is so clear and perfect that it reflects all the other jewels in the net, “the way two mirrors placed opposite each other will reflect an image ad infinitum. The jewel in this metaphor stands for an individual being, or an individual consciousness, or a cell or an atom. Every jewel is intimately connected with all other jewels in the universe, and a change in one jewel means a change, however slight, in every other jewel.”
In other words, we are all so intimately connected to each other – human, animal, plant – that it’s as if this net covers the entire planet. Pluck one string in the net, and all of them vibrate. And this was how it felt to Sandy, a retired veterinarian, who experienced a cluster of hummingbird synchronicities that seemed to be telling her that her beloved dog, Nellie, might be ailing.
In August 2013, Nellie was twelve and a half, wasn’t eating well, just wasn’t herself. One night, Sandy had a magnificent dream about two hummingbirds hovering around her mailbox, facing each other. They were larger than normal hummingbirds and she sensed they were mates. In the dream, their wings came together to form a heart shape.
A couple of days after she’d had the dream, she and her husband, George, were sitting in their yard and a hummingbird appeared, larger than most hummingbirds, just as in her dream. “Hummingbirds are winter residents in Florida and it was mid-August; I have no idea what a hummingbird was doing here at this time of year,” she says. “To me, the hummingbird represents angelic energy, joy.”
A few days later, she was downloading songs that a friend had sent her years ago – 200 songs, odds and ends. She figured she should get them into the music file on her computer. While the songs were downloading, she noticed a hummingbird out in the garden and went over to the window to get a closer look. But it had flown away. She turned back to her computer and saw that the download had stalled. The song that refused to download? Seals & Croft’s Hummingbird.
The next day, Sandy passed a road she’d never seen before and glanced at the sign: Hummingbird Lane. It was now abundantly clear to her that she was in the grips of synchronicity and she felt it was related to Nellie’s deterioration. Sandy checked her over and found a large mass in her abdomen. She took the dog to her vet, and sure enough, he identified it as well. He didn’t think Nellie was a candidate for surgery and not long afterward, Sandy and George had to have her put down.
Sandy understood that the cluster of hummingbird synchros had been alerting her to Nellie’s condition. Hummingbirds not only symbolize joy, but in some indigenous traditions are considered to be messengers from the spirit world. “These synchros softened the blow of her passing, and helped to heal our broken hearts.”
This story begs the question: did Nellie’s soul summon these hummingbirds so that Sandy would become aware that Nellie wasn’t just ailing, but was dying? Can a dog’s soul call on other creatures – even those of a different species – and enlist their help in the process of dying?
Perhaps. As author Dean Koontz writes in A Big Little Life: a memoir of a joyful dog named Trixie, (about his special Golden Retriever) “Living with a recognition of the spiritual dimension of the world not only ensures a happier life but also a more honest intellectual life than if we allow no room for wonder and refuse to acknowledge the mystery of existence.”
This pretty much nails the bottom line:
A petition to the electoral college to elect Clinton as the winner. After all, she has the popular vote, just as Gore did in 2000. More than 4 million people have signed.
HBO has some fantastic original programming – Game of Thrones comes immediately to mind. Rob and I have watched 6 of 10 episodes of WestWorld, a series built on Michael Crichton’s screenplay for a movie of the same name, released in 1973. It’s phenomenal.
Anthony Hopkins, Ed Harris…these two actors alone give the show an indescribable quality. Some of the same Crichton themes are evident – WestWorld is a theme park, like Jurassic Park, but a far more sophisticated version in that the robots in the park are discovering their own consciousness. Think of it as a cross between The Matrix and Jurassic Park, haunting and strange. Like The Matrix, it urges you to question the nature of reality, the ultimate question in quantum physics and in metaphysics.
I love shows that urge you, the viewer, to ask yourself: “Uh-oh. How much of what I perceive is real?”
Interestingly, it parallels some of the themes in Rob’s novel, Tulpas, now being submitted to publishers. In his novel, the dream world becomes the physical world and this is brought about by the manipulation of reality by one particular tulpa, a thought form created by Tibetan monks centuries ago. This tulpa created other thought forms and they have evolved throughout the centuries and attained a kind of consciousness, just like the robots in WestWorld. The parallels are eerie and Rob started writing this novel long before WestWorld showed up on TV.
The irony, at least for me, is that Crichton was such a brilliant storyteller, who wrote an incredible non-fiction book, Travels, about his metaphysical quest to understand reality, but who, at the end of his life, ended up to the far right politically. The dichotomy has puzzled me for years. I’m not saying that the right wing lacks creative impulses, but that for a man who wrote Travels, it just doesn’t make any sense at all.
JJ Abrams- LOST – directed WestWorld. And that makes perfect sense.
