Welcome to The Mystical Underground

Here’s a little survey. See how many of these questions you answer positively, and we’ll tell you what that means…or might mean.

• Do you remember ever seeing a ghost?
• Do you remember feeling as if you left your body?
• Do you remember seeing a UFO?
• Do you remember waking up paralyzed with a sense of a strange person or presence or something else in the room?
• Do you remember feeling that you were actually flying through the air although you didn’t know how or why?
• Do you remember having seen unusual lights or balls of light in a room without knowing what was causing them?
• Do you remember having seen, either as a child or adult, a terrifying figure– which might have been a monster, a witch, a devil, or some other evil figure– in your bedroom or closet or somewhere else?
• Do you remember experiencing a period of time, an hour or more, in which you were lost, but could not remember why or where?
• Do you remember having vivid dreams about UFO?
• Do you remember finding puzzling scars on your body and neither you nor anyone else remembering how you received them or where you got them?

“The focus of attention on skin samples and reproductive organs seems to suggest an interest in human anatomy and reproduction. If the examinations are for the benefit of the human species, the methods of involuntary intrusion and the subsequent post-traumtic stress that many victims report, is suspicious. The effort to produce amnesia is largely successful, as this study has shown. This could support a theory that the abductors have a more comprehensive understanding of our minds than we have of ourselves. It could also indicate a genuine consideration for our well-being, similar to our use of tranquilizers when examining endangered animal species. It could well be that the abductors have a similar mission with our species.”

The survey was sponsored by Robert Bigelow, a billionaire space pioneer, who is fascinated by UFOs and other unexplained phenomenon. He submitted the survey findings to members of an organization for psychiatrists. Unfortunately, the survey probably did more to damper the belief in alien abductions than support it, solely by the enormous numbers of abductees generated by the survey.

For more on this survey, look here. Since this survey, the Roper Organization has divided into the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, a non-profit organization, and a the for-profit Roper Poll. Both organizations were created by Elmo Roper. 

We’ve done several radio shows for Aliens in the Backyard, and have more shows scheduled. It’s an often overlooked publicity for books, with its own peculiar pace and texture, and you can do the show in your pajamas and who’s going to know? Radio even lends itself to synchros. But before we go there, a bit of background is in order.

Over the years, Rob and I have done our share of radio shows. We loved doing Coast to Coast with Art Bell back in the late 90s. He was an engaging host, with a genuine passion for the topics he discussed. Whitley Strieber’s Dreamland has also been fun and enjoyable. We’ve done that show twice, for our first two synchronicity books.  Whitley and his wife, Anne, are knowledgeable about the topics they take on, and understand the art of conversation. With them, you’re free to speculate, theorize, and you don’t have to hold back. We enjoyed the interview we did with Mike Clelland on one of the synchro books.  Mike engages, drills, asks unexpected questions.

We LOVED David Schrader’s show, Darkness Radio, that we did on February 14. He has a great sense of humor and that Midwestern affability that invites you to have a beer with him at the local watering hole after the show. He also knows his field – the paranormal –   and the questions he asks, the points he raises, are valid and insightful.

At one point in the show, we were talking about Charles Fontaine’s experience after he’d left the graveyard – and nine days before his encounter – when he found his pants filled with blood. His first thought was that he was going to die. His father had been diagnosed with colon cancer twenty years earlier and Charles believed it was now his turn. Before we could finish telling the story, the show  went to break.

One of the first subsequent commercials to air was a public service announcement about the importance of colon/rectal cancer screenings. Rob hurries into my office the phone at his ear, and says, “A synchro. Let’s pick up there!”

Wow, I thought, okay. A colon/rectal synchro. Not exactly elevated stuff, but okay, it’s a synchro, all right. Rob pointed it out to David when we went back on air and none of us really knew what it might mean… rectal alien probes?

Our daughter, Megan, is writing a novel. She has outlined it, written 30 pages that she sent us, and today  experienced a synchronicity that perfectly illustrates one of the secrets in our book 7 Secrets of Synchronicity.  The fourth secret, The Creative, is that creativity lies at the heart of synchronicity.  At the beginning of that chapter, we use a quote by physicists and author F David Peat: “The space between…is the space that lies between the observer and the observed; it is the space of the creative act that brings a poem or a painting to life.”

Or a novel.

In her novel, the protagonist, Riley Phoenix, 22, lives in a second story one-bedroom flat with lousy plumbing, in a neighborhood that isn’t very safe, and there’s no security whatsoever in the building – no cameras, no concierge, no security people. But she’s perfectly happy living by herself in this place.  Okay, that’s the setup for the synchro.

This weekend Megan drove over to Florida’s west coast to see a friend with whom she went to high school. Renie had recently moved and Megan hadn’t ever been to her place. So she got there, they went out on the town, and this morning, Megan bolted awake and realized she was in her character’s apartment.  Renie lives in a one-bedroom flat, on the second story of a building, in a not very safe area of town, and the building has no security whatsoever. And oh, Renie’s flat has terrible plumbing.

“It wasn’t like I walked into Renie’ place last night and thought, Wow, this is where Riley lives. It just hit me out of the blue this morning.  So I walked around, taking pictures of the place so I can now fill in the details of Riley’s flat.”

When she called to tell us the synchro, we told her it was a positive sign for her book and her creative process. She agreed, but added, “It’s because I have absolutely no resistance to writing this novel. I know I can do it.”

Pretty cool, huh?

Remember Bo Derek in the movie 10?

She played the quintessential woman that every man  desires. That face, that body, that presence. But it turns out that Bo is much more than her PR. She was featured in the Palm Beach Post at the beginning of polo season, 56 years old and still a 10, a horse breeder and activist, the natural to toss the first ball at the 10^th anniversary opening game at the International Polo Club.

The synchro for us in this story was  horses. We were  putting together a proposal for a bookazine on famous horses through history. Our town has quite a prolific history on horses, specifically those used in polo. Thanks in  large part to John Goodman,   the multimillionaire founder of the International Polo Club, Wellington is what, back in the sixties, we would call a Ta-ta community.

Ta-Ta is another name for lah-de-dah,  as in, Huh? Seriously?

But here’s the thing. We were writing about polo, about how it’s the game of kings, and this story about Bo Derek, the ’10 of 10s’ –royalty! – turns up in the fluff section of our local newspaper. You can tell that the interviewer was a bit overwhelmed at interviewing the perfect ’10.’ The questions were sort of silly, like, well, what does she admire about horses? Her response, though, was spot on: They have a sense of the game and they do learn and know what the goal is, the way they’ll fight off another horse and hold the line. It’s wonderful to see.”

 So these types of stories are the oddball synchros happening in our corner of the world. Nothing earth-shattering here, nothing that shakes us up or weirds us out too much. These synchros are perhaps, most of all, a trickster sort of entertainment, especially when the horse bookazine didn’t pan out – despite the fluff and the synchro!

In my daily perusal of statcounter, I discovered something I had never heard of called URLpulse. The hit came from Ottawa, Canada, home of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who have shown an interest in our blog since we first wrote bout the Quebec encounters.  So I clicked on this link and learned a whole bunch of statistics about blogs and websites.

URL pulse uses a particular algorhythm to  arrive at the conclusions they present on their website – how many daily and monthly hits your website or blog receives, from which countries, some of the key words, all sorts of weird tidbits. We use one such site like this that tracks book sales on Amazon, using an algorhythm. The tally isn’t always exact – it’s sometimes way off. But it was accurate enough to tell me that when my publisher lowered the ebook price  of Esperanza to $2.99, it made a substantial difference in my ebook sales – hundreds in a single month. When they jacked the price up again to $11.99, sales fell sharply.

On URLpulse.co, your website or blog’s net worth is calculated according to how many hits you receive. Guess who number 1 is in the US and worldwide? Google. Each month, more than 64 billion pages are viewed, it receives more than one billion monthly visits, it has more than 9 million external links, and it’s estimate worth is $1.39 billion.

Facebook is number 2 in the U.S and worldwide. Monthly pages views: over 61 billion, with monthly visits at nearly 2 billion, with more than 13 million external links. Estimated worth? $1.29 billion.

Yahoo comes in at number 4 in US and worldwide with more than 17 billion monthly pages views, more than 2 billion monthly visits, worth $1.86 billion.

At this point, I wondered about number 3. Amazon? Nope, they come in at number 5 in U.S., 111 worldwide, with more than 11 billion monthly page views and more than 400 million monthly visits.Estimated worth? $304.45 million.

The iTunes website? It ranks 22 in the U.S., 26 worldwide.

At this point, I got curious about our industry – writers, publishers, agents.  Random House, one of the largest publishers with multiple imprints, is ranked at 5,829 in the U.S., 21,339 worldwide, with more than 2 million pages views a month, less than a million monthly visits, and its estimated worth is slightly more than half a million bucks.

Well, okay, how about JK Rowling and Stephen King? Rowling comes in at over 59,000 in the U.S., over 155,000 worldwide. Monthly page views number over 400,000 a month, with monthly visits at slightly over 165,000. The estimated worth of the site is $119,801.56.

This is where I began to think that maybe these algorhythms don’t work well. Rowling is the first billionaire author, her books have sold millions. Then I took a look at stephenking.com. It’s ranked at 17,177 in the U.S., 82,333 worldwide, with over a million pageviews a month, less than 200,000 monthly visits, with an estimated worth of $136,603.33. Really? That’s it for the great Stephen King?

I encourage you to check your own website or blog. Not every single one is listed, but we found ours – not the blog, but the website. Our website  is fairly static; we add stuff when the occasion arises. The blog, on the other hand, is a nearly daily endeavor. So these statistics apparently include the website and the blog and, according to our statcounter, they aren’t very accurate:

Our monthly visits run between eight to ten thousand. These include unique and repeat visitors. I’m not sure about the page views; the above figure seems too high, but I’ll have to keep closer track in the future. What really made me laugh about all this is the value placed on each visitor – less than a quarter. C’mon, the knowledge, information and insight that visitors and commenters provide are incalculable. Where do those attributes enter into algorhythms?