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We live in schizophrenic times, it seems, when people are so polarized by what they believe about anything that civil discussions aren’t an option. The politician who seems to exemplify this schizophrenia is Putin.

This dude appeared shirtless on horseback, hiking, showing off his biceps and triceps and abs – and we don’t know whether women swooned and fainted at the sight of him.  What we do know is that he and his wife are now divorced.  We know that Putin was a KGB agent for 16 years, was elected as president in 1999…and well, you can read the rest of his strange political career here.

We know that Putin dislikes gays, that there are many stringent laws in Russia against gays, and that it was an issue during the Olympics.  We know that Putin granted whistleblower Edward Snowden asylum. And Snowden is the only area where I agree with Putin. Even though Putin probably did it for political reasons – instead of for the right reasons – his decision bought Snowden time. There’s an ironic synchro in this that we wrote about previously.

The bottom line is Putin is on the wrong side of history with his invasion of the Crimea. Recently, there was a vote about whether the Crimea should leave the Ukraine and rejoin Russia and the vote is apparently overwhelming in favor of linking up with Russia. The U.S. refuses to recognize this vote.

“Under the stage direction of the Russian Federation, a circus performance is underway: the so-called referendum,” Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said Sunday. “Also taking part in the performance are 21,000 Russian troops, who with their guns are trying to prove the legality of the referendum.”

As soon as the polls closed, the White House again denounced the vote: “The international community will not recognize the results of a poll administered under threats of violence,” it said in a statement. “Russia’s actions are dangerous and destabilizing.”

My question is this: Why should the U. S. be involved in this at all? The answer seems to be fairly straightforward: oil.

Why are we still an oil-based economy? Why was the electric car killed? What about solar power, wind power, ocean power? Back in 1973, when an oil embargo was in full force, I remember sitting in line at a gas station for three hours in order to fill my tank. And back then, gas was cheap. In fact, in June 1973, around the tine I used to wait in those lines, gas cost 42 cents a gallon. Yeah, you read that correctly. 42 CENTS. On a good day here in the U.S. gas is close to four bucks a gallon. In Europe, it’s much higher.

Yet, pundits who manipulate numbers would have you believe there’s no such thing as inflation. These are the same pundits who want you to believe that Snowden is a terrorist for revealing the extent of NSA spying on its own citizens.

Go figure.

We don’t just live in strange times. We ARE the strange times. Until our collective beliefs reach a tipping point, until we realize that corporate power spells political power, until we somehow extricate ourselves from the matrix of consensus thought and go rogue in our own lives, we are as trapped as Snowden. We may have a bit of breathing room, we may remain free for another day or month or year. But at some point, it will all catch up to us.

Oh, Putin. How macho you look without a shirt. What a man’s man you are on horseback.   We’re grateful that you grated Snowden asylum. But hey, dude, I mean, really. The Crimea? Why? What’s the point?

You would think that someone name Incognito would be a low-key character, one who avoided detection, literally slipped through the cracks of life. For years, Richie Incognito was relatively obscure…obscure for a starting National Football League player. He played guard for the Miami Dolphins, and offensive linemen are typically the grunts, blocking every play, never touching the football, unless they happen to recover a fumble by a teammate. Rarely making headlines.

But this past year, Incognito has shed his role that matched his name and become infamous, even outside of football, as the ringleader of a clique of players who taunted and bullied other players on his own team. His behavior came to light when one of his targets – lineman Jonathan Martin- abruptly left the team, because of Incognito’s excessive verbal assaults and demeaning stunts. The idea of a 300-pound player being the victim of bullying was surprising, spread across the media, and ignited an NFL investigation. Meanwhile, the Dolphins suspended Incognito and don’t plan to re-sign him this year when his contract runs out.

Now, months after the controversy began,  Incognito is again in the limelight for a couple of reasons. First, the report of the NFL investigation was released and Incognito was cited as the fall-guy. His reaction (since Martin wasn’t within his reach) was to pummel his $300,000 Ferrari with a baseball bat. His deed leaked out and once again he was making news. The next day he entered a treatment facility in Arizona where he lives. That too made headlines.

Incognito no more. If he ever plays for another team, the veteran player will be the most infamous lineman in the game.

And oh, by the way. See that green number? He’s right in synch for St. Patrick’s Day!

….it’s a bird. Or rather birds.

A Powerpoint presentation by the NSA, leaked by Edward Snowden, apparently includes three slides of UFOs. But it’s not what UFO buffs hoped for – revelation that the government knows UFOs are real. Quite the opposite. The slides are apparently part of a training session for spies on how to create and spread false information on the Internet. In other words, lying to the public. No wonder people don’t trust the government.

Disinformation aside, the images themselves seem to be of a questionable nature with one in particular being dismissed by UFO enthusiasts as an “out of focus picture of a seagull.”

“Government agencies are still aware of the power of the belief in UFOs, and that they are willing to use the Internet to exploit these beliefs,” said author Nigel Watson. “Such deception can be used as a means of covering-up more mundane terrestrial activities (like the testing of secret aircraft or military exercises) or to undermine the credibility of ufologists.”

We’ve noticed government agencies coming to our blog when we put up UFO-related post. It could be that this secretive interest in UFOs could have more to do with studying means to create disinformation than it in any attempt to comprehend the nature of the UFO/alien contact phenomena. More than likely it’s a combination with agencies pursuing the issue for varying reasons, including trying to figure out what other agencies know and what they’re pursuing.

Meanwhile, according to the Unexplained Mysteries website, a fake UFO invasion using drones is being planned for April. We’ll see. Apparently, the “Big UFO Project” was originally planned for April Fool’s Day, but was pushed back several days from the first of the month. We’ll see what we see, if anything.

We had quite a few comments from our post a couple of days ago on missing Flight 370. But here’s a couple you didn’t see that arrived via e-mail.

You may recall our post about former CIA remote viewer (psychic spy) Joe McMoneagle and how he targeted Mars 1 million B.C. for NASA back in the early ’80s. Since Joe is still working privately as a remote viewer, I was curious if he had targeted the missing flight from Malaysia.  When I e-mailed him, he responded promptly. Here is what he said:

“Did so days ago and filed it with appropriate authorities. Put them in the Andaman islands, or close to there. We’ll see what happens over time. Best, Joe”

The Andaman Islands are located in the Indian Ocean, and the recent revelation confirming that the plane continued flying for 4 hours after contact was lost extended the search out into the Indian Ocean. In fact, a report from the New York Daily News here cites the Andaman Islands as the possible destination and even suggested the plane landed safely there.

It’s starting to sound like an episode out of LOST. Somebody check the beach.

Meanwhile, the mysterious Peter Levenda sent us the following e-mail:

Andaman Islands

Ever since we saw the trailer for Captain Philips, it’s been on our must see list of movies. But we somehow missed it in the theaters and didn’t get to see it until our daughter came home and rented it through ATT’s U-Verse – at three in the morning. At six bucks, it’s a bargain, particularly if more than one person is watching it. The irony is that we didn’t watch it until after Megan returned to Orlando.

In a nutshell, the story – based on true events – is about the first American cargo ship to be hijacked in 200 years.   The Somalian actors were selected from an audition of 700 Somalians in Minneapolis, which has a large Somalian population, and wow, are these guys ever cast perfectly. Tom Hanks plays Captain Philips and yes, he is absolutely stellar in this role, as he is in every role he has ever played.

Whether Hanks is playing Forest Gump or the AIDS victim in Philadelphia or the captain of this American cargo ship that is hijacked, he’s believable in every role. Hanks is one of those rare actors who is able to crawl inside the skin of the character he’s portraying and lose himself in it. We still know he is  Tom Hanks, but for the duration of the movie he is Gump or Philips and we are transported into his world – of magic, terror, loneliness, desperation, despair, triumph, whatever the emotion.  And that’s the key, I think, to his success. Hanks find the essential emotional theme  of the character and moves into it completely.

The screenwriter for this movie – Billy Ray –  also wrote the screenplay for The Hunger Games,  an adaptation from a novel, just like Captain Philips.  He certainly has a great sense for pacing, conflict, characterization. Since the movie runs two and a half hours, we had decided to watch it over the course of two nights. That plan bombed as soon as we started watching the movie. This story moves. There’s no place for a tidy intermission. If you take a break for munchies or the restroom, you had better pause the movie. It’s riveting from start to finish.

It was nominated for 6 Oscars- and didn’t win in any category, but should have.  There’s a larger social theme to this film that is sad, tragic, catastrophic. The Somalian pirates in the movie are driven by desperation, hunger, need. Their lives in Somalia are so terrible that they would be better off in American prisons where they would at least have three meals a day and a bed to sleep in.

In the final scenes of the movie, as the SEALS move in to save Philips, I was left with a terrible bitterness in the pit of my stomach that any people, anywhere on the planet, should be driven to such extremes of violence. When you’re hungry, does anything else matter?

Captain Philips isn’t just a riveting thriller; it’s a statement about how far we have yet to go as a species, as a collective, to create a more inclusive world in which no one goes hungry or despairs and is driven to desperate measures because of a lack of fundamentals.

Disc golf is said to be one of the fastest growing sports. It basically involves playing golf with modified Frisbees. Instead of a hole in the ground, the discs are tossed into a metal basket with hanging chains to stop the disc.

A couple of years ago, an 18-hole disc golf course sprouted a few miles from our house in a county park. I’ve always been an avid Frisbee player and after the course opened I bought my first set of discs – a driver, a mid-range, and a putter.

My regular partner is a big guy named Bill, who’s about three decades younger than me. He’s got long arms and a big throw, but he lacks my Frisbee-playing background and so I used to beat him regularly. Not so anymore. Now our games are always close.

The most treacherous part of our course is the 14th hole, which requires tossing the disk over a pond. It’s covered with lily pads and looks like a great place for gators to hang out. This is South Florida, after all. I heard a gator croaking one day, but so far, Bill and I have only seen an otter in the pond. Maybe the gators are on vacation. Maybe that’s a good thing, considering my last two games.

Both times on the 14th hole my driver shot fell short, dropping into the water close to the far shore. Both times I threw yellow discs.

The first time, my throw struck a wall of reeds that rise several feet above the opposite shore and the disc bounced back into the lily pads and sank. We walked around the pond, worked our way through the reeds, and spotted a yellow disc about five feet from shore. The problem was the disc was in about 5 feet of water, but fortunately I had worn board shorts. So I dove in, felt around the bottom for about ten seconds, and finally latched onto the disc. I popped up, held up the disc and Bill said, “That’s not your disc.” And he was right. I’d recovered  someone else’s. Same color, different disc.

Since I was already in the water, I continued searching for mine, but didn’t find it. Maybe the alligator ate it before I got there!

The next week, literally the same thing happened. The disc fell short. Again we spotted a yellow disc resting on the bottom. This time I figured it was the one I lost the previous week, because the location wasn’t right for the one I’d just tossed into the pond. I dove in, recovered it, and again, Bill said, “That’s not your disc.” He was right.

So I was two for two. I’d lost two yellow discs, recovered two yellow discs. But neither were mine. What were the chances of that?

Not my pond, but about the right size.

The disappearance of the Malaysian Boeing  777, flight 370,  on March 7-8 has triggered investigations and searches by several countries. Even now, no one knows for sure what happened.

No debris has been found. The oil slicks that were mentioned initially weren’t from airplane fuel. What was thought to be a cargo door or life raft turned out to be debris. The weather was good, the plane was at cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. So what happened?

The flight took off from Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, at 12:41 a.m. on Saturday, March 8 (afternoon of March 7, ET). It was scheduled to arrive in Bejing, China at 6:30 a.m. the same day, a journey of 2,300 miles – a distance  comparable to a flight between Miami and L.A. But around 1:30 a.m., as the plane was crossing the sea between Malaysia and Vietnam, air traffic controllers in Subang, outside of Kaula Lumpur, lost contact with it.

The pilots didn’t indicate that any problem existed, no distress signal was issued, but Malaysia officials say there’s radar evidence that the plane may have changed course and turned back toward Kuala Lumpur. The plane had 239 people on board – 227 passengers and 12 crew members.  Five of the passengers were children under the age of five. More than a dozen nationalities were represented among the passengers.

Speculation abounds and the picture became murkier when it was learned that two passengers were flying on stolen passports. An Italian and an Austrian man reported their passports stolen in 2012 and 2013, in Thailand. The tickets related to these stolen passports were bought together, by an Iranian man who said his two friends wanted to return to Europe- from Kuala Lumpur to Bejing and Amsterdam and to Copenhagen.

Similarities have been drawn between the disappearance of this flight and Air France flight 447 from Rio to Paris that vanished in 2009. The similarities:

–     –   Three days into the search, the plane is still missing. The Air France plane was found almost two years after its disappearance. A week after its crash, a few pieces of the tail were recovered.

–       – Both planes were at cruising altitude, above the sea

–       – 12 crew members for both flights.  With crew, the Malaysia flight had 239 passengers, the Air France flight had 228.

–       – Safety records. The Boeing 777 and the Air France Airbus 330 have terrific safety records.

–       – No Mayday signal

–       – Both jets had sustained minor damage on the ground and were repaired. In the Air France flight, no correlation was established with the earlier damage.

Theories range from bombs to hijacking to pilot suicide to a catastrophic technical failure.   Conspiracy websites are having a field day with this one.

But, you have to wonder. No debris, no Mayday signal, nothing from emergency transponders, which start signaling on impact with water or land.

I’ve been searching for a synchronicity in this story – and there probably are several – that might point the way to the truth. Other than the parallels to the crash of the Air France flight in 2009, which also had some major differences, like with weather, I haven’t found any. Has anyone else spotted synchros in any of this?

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UPDATE

IS HERE.

During the first five or six years of our marriage, Rob and I got to know a number of South Florida psychics and people involved in the UFO field. Two of these psychics were extraordinary – Renie Wiley and Tony Grosso, both of whom have since passed on.

Renie was my astrology mentor and an empath. She worked with cops in Cooper City, Florida on the various cases, including the disappearance of Christie Luna and Adam Walsh.

Several days after our daughter was born, Renie interpreted Megan’s astrological chart for us – and just about everything she said 24 years ago has unfolded.

She was a large-boned redhead, a Sagittarian with a heart and talent as huge as the Pacific who never minced word. When she entered a room people felt it. If you messed with Renie or someone she loved, she never fought back; she simply got even.

Tony was a short, plump gay man and one of the few people I’ve met whose sign I don’t remember! He lived in a trailer in Pembroke Pines, Florida, and also worked with cops, sometimes in tandem with Renie. He and Rob co-authored The Rainbow Oracle, a divination system Tony developed with color.

Around this same time, we also got to know psychic Linda Georgian, who eventually hosted the Psychic Information Network with singer Dionne Warwick, one of the first infomercial TV shows.

So when I wrote my second novel, Hidden Lake, published by Ballantine, I wondered what would happen if you had a community of psychics in which a murder occurred. Would there be too much information to solve the murder? Would the info be faulty, filtered through a psychic’s subjective lens? How would the investigation differ from, well, an ordinary murder?

Ballantine gave the book an awful cover – some dude in a brown suit lying on the ground. First off, in the novel, the victim was a woman, not a man. Second, what man in his right mind wears a suit like this in the middle of a South Florida summer?  

I was paid less for this book than I was for my first and later learned why. Bob Wyatt, who was then editor-in-chief, had told my editor, Chris Cox, to advise me to ditch the paranormal. And for a long time, I did. For a long time, I wrote linear novels that hinted at the psychic unity of life, but never spelled it out.

When Chris died in the early 90s, Rob and I flew to New York for the memorial service. Megan was a year or so old and wailed throughout most of the service. I remember that Rob stood at the back of the auditorium with her in a stroller and I sat up near the front because Chris, in his will, had requested that I speak at his memorial service.

The lead speaker was actress Susan Sarandon, whom Chris had known for years. She spoke movingly of their friendship and I later learned that when he was dying of AIDS, she had paid for a private nurse to tend to him.  I have admired  this woman ever since.

When I went through the formatted version of this book, which I hadn’t re-read since I  submitted it in 1986, I felt Renie and Tony around, I felt my younger self struggling to evaluate what she was learning, I loved writing Hidden Lake because most of the players were based on real people.

And if I were to meet editor Bob Wyatt today, I would tell him just how wrong he was. We need to know that we are connected to one another, that what impacts you, impacts me, that what you learn eventually filters down to me. We are that closely aligned with one another.

Now Hidden Lake has a second life as an e-book and Crossroad gave it a cool cover, depicted above. Here’s an excerpt.

Synchronicities can be complex or simple. They can unfold over time or be done within seconds or minutes.  

Our friend Melissa sent us a synchro that involves concert tickets and seating. It’s short and puzzling and no telling what it means. Is it a light-hearted trickster?

“Today I bought two sets of tickets for a Tori Amos concert, one in Miamiand one in New York City. Take a look at my seats:

Miami: Row DD, Seats 101,102

NYC: Row D, Seats 101,102

“Not sure what this could mean, but I’m into it!”

 In 2012,  authors and radio personalities Jeffrey Pritchett and Andrew B. Colvin invited a number of Bigfoot researchers onto their radio show, The Church of Mabus and began an investigation into the Bigfoot phenomenon. The result is a fascinating book, Praise for the Hairy Man: The Secret Life of Bigfoot.

The authors, both of whom have had Bigfoot sightings and experiences, used a simple “10 questions” interview format and delved into a diversity of areas about this elusive creature. The areas include: the Bigfoot/alien connection, the possible role of ancient aliens in the genetic history of the Yeti, the sex habits of Sasquatch, reports of telepathy, shapeshifting and flight with Bigfoot, Native American beliefs in Sasquatch.

One of the chapters that intrigued me was an interview with Stacy Brown Jr., whose team is called the Sasquatch Hunters of Florida.  There are 12 members on his team who come from a variety of backgrounds but are united in their passion to find out the truth about Sasquatch. The team has various hair samples and a pair of handprints and are now working with a forensic scientist who will study the DNA of the samples.

Brown recounts one of his own experiences. In November 2011, he and another man, Matt Roberts, pitched a tent on a property and were in “for one scary night. The creatures walked around our camp all night. We had hickory nuts thrown at us.  At one point, we woke up to our tent shaking. We got a  thermal image that night and some really good audio. Needless to say, I was ‘sold.’ I quit the band I was in, and went into Bigfoot full-throttle.”

When Brown was asked if Sasquatch might be a paranormal or multidimensional creature, he replies that anything is possible. “Any time you go that route, though, people think you are nuts. It’s just too much for their minds to grasp.” During his experiences that night in November, he thought the creatures might be ghosts because they got around so effortlessly.

Brown’s team offers Sasquatch trips, where you camp out in areas where the creature has been sighted, are trained in their high tech gear, and includes three meals.

I particularly enjoyed the chapters that draw connections between Bigfoot and UFOs. In Chapter 5, the authors interview Stan Gordon, a former Pennsylvania state director for MUFON. He’s also an author and has appeared on numerous TV shows talking about his research. According to Gordon: “There are a small percentage of cases… where observers have seen both a UFO and Bigfoot at the same time and location. From the reports I have received from across the country and around the world, such cases may be much more common than first thought.” The biggest problem, Gordon notes, is that many researchers are reluctant to publish such accounts for fear of ridicule.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Whether it’s Bigfoot, UFOs, aliens, or anything else that goes bump in the night,  fear of ridicule seems to be a huge impediment to finding the truth.

Praise for the Hairy Man: The Secret Life of Bigfoot is a terrific compilation of research, stories, and theories about what this creature might actually be.

Tonight, from 7-9 p.m. eastern time, we’ll be live on The Church of Mabus, talking about The Synchronicity Highway.

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Trish wrote the above, but didn’t realize that I’d had a synchronicity yesterday related to the same subject. I was reading one of the interviews in Pritchett’s book when I felt a nudge to go to the Unexplained Mysteries, a website that I hadn’t visited for months. Surprisingly, the first thing I saw was an article about a Sasquash sighting on Vancouver Island.

That reminded of my own sighting many years ago in the North Woods of Minnesota, a large region in the northeastern part of the state known as Arrowhead Country or the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA). No motorized vehicles are allowed and transportation is by canoe and portages…trails connecting the numerous lakes. I still recall portaging my canoe, which had pads for my shoulders and carrying a Duluth pack with my camping gear on the trips I used to take, usually one around Memorial Day weekend, the Fourth of July or Labor Day.

On one particular trip, a friend and I paddled across a lake to a campsite at sunset. It was the only campsite on that lake. We had the place to ourselves. After pulling the canoe up to shore, I followed a trail leading from the campsite to a big wooden box, the outdoor toilet supplied by the park service. No outhouse, just a box above a hole in the ground, in the forest.

As I approached it, I stopped as I saw a figure moving through the woods about fifty feet away. I glanced down for just a moment, feeling a bit disappointed that someone else was here. As I looked up, the figure raced through the thick woods at an incredible speed on two feet. It wasn’t human, wasn’t a bear. Within moments, it was gone.

When I told my friend what I saw, he was intrigued at first. But then he thought otherwise when I told him what exactly I saw. The creature appeared to be wearing something white on its head that I described as a sailor hat with the brim pulled down. My friend, Laurel, just shook his head. He believed there might be Yeti in the forest, but not one wearing a sailor hat.

A few years later, I read a description of a Bigfoot sighting that included an illustration. The creature had a conical head, and the top half of it was white. That was what I saw!