Welcome to The Mystical Underground

In 2005, I co-authored THE FOG, a book about the Bermuda Triangle with Bruce Gernon. We told Bruce’s story in Aliens in the Backyard, and now as we’re writing the sequel The Synchronicity Highway, I recalled a story Bruce told me that we didn’t use in Aliens. I couldn’t remember all the details, but quickly jotted down the story as best I could, then send Bruce an e-mail with a copy of it and asked him to clarify anything I got wrong.

So here’s what I had written.

On another occasion, Gernon went boating on the ocean with a group of friends near sunset. As the boarded the party boat, Gernon told the owner of the boat that they would see a UFO that evening. The man laughed, thinking that Gernon was joking. But after dark, a bright light appeared in the distance, hovered, then shot off and disappeared. The boat owner told everyone that Gernon had predicted the UFO. “I didn’t believe him and I didn’t believe in UFOs. But thanks to Bruce, I’ve seen the light!”

Bruce called me a few minutes later and reminded me that actually we’d used the story in THE FOG. I’d recalled the gist of it, but left out a lot of details. The UFO had beamed a light down to the ocean, which moved in a slow circle several times as the craft descended lower and lower toward the ocean, then simply disappeared into the sea.

When Bruce called, he was somewhat baffled that I’d written him about this story. In fact, it was fresh in his mind because he had just had lunch with Timothy Bogle, the boat captain, that night, a couple of days earlier and they’d talked about it.

Hey, synchronicity and maybe telepathy as well. Bruce hadn’t seen Bogle for years and I hadn’t talked to Bruce for a few months. Yet it all came together.

The reason he’d gotten together with Bogle was that a History Channel program was considering doing yet another show that would feature his Bermuda Triangle experience and they were looking for a new angle. They wanted to interview the first people he talked to about what happened to him in his now infamous flight from Andros Island to West Palm Beach.

Considering the incident occurred in December 1970, many of those people–including Manson Valentine, then director of the Miami Museum of Science and an avid researcher of mysteries of the unknown–are now dead. But Bogle was still among the living and Bruce remembered telling him about his strange experience the same day he predicted that they would see a UFO when they went out for the planned party at sea.

Bruce told him the production company would also probably ask about the UFO they saw. But 40 years has passed and Bogle, who was a skeptic before he ‘saw the light,’ had slipped back into skeptical mode. He told Bruce it was probably an airplane and besides he was high at the time. Bruce reminded him that the craft had made no sound and they’d remarked that the engine sound of airplanes travels over water for miles. But Bogle just shook his head. He couldn’t go on television and say that he’d seen a UFO.

He no longer saw the light. Too bad. But Bruce sees the light now more than ever. For years, he tried to explain the Bermuda Triangle as an unknown weather condition he refers to as electronic fog. But now in retrospect he’s convinced that the B.T. phenomenon is directly related to UFOs and that the enormous cloud that chased him and surrounded his plane, then literally teleported him 100 miles in an instant, was harboring a UFO. After all, in the aftermath, he had no less than 20 UFO sightings, including one close encounter, and on several occasions he predicted they would appear. Something definitely happened to Bruce that day.

I told him years ago that I felt a UFO was at the heart of his experience, and  he finally agrees.

This video of Chinese dancers – or gymnasts, yoga students, who knows what they are? – is astounding.

In 1984, we accompanied an empath and friend, Renie Wiley, to a police station to observe her working on a missing child case, that of Christie Luna. We wrote about it in 7 Secrets of Synchronicity and updated  the story nearly 25 years later, when the mystery seemed to come full circle.

 Recently, in California, there was a case of a missing boy that reminded me of the Christie Luna case. Pam Ragland, 50, was watching a TV show about the search for an 11-year-old California boy, Terry Dewayne Smith Jr. who was missing in a nearby rural town.

As Ragland watched the show, she started crying and then had a vision of a young boy lying  on his side, his eyes closed. At first, Ragland didn’t want to get involved, but the images kept coming to her: the boy, a dirt road, a distinctive building that looked like a hay barn, and a single tree standing alone. Ragland saw a dark night with city lights in the distance.

 She finally called the tip line and a sergeant directed he call to the sheriff’s command center in Menifee, more than an hour’s drive from where she lived. She hustled her young children into her car and made the drive.

 The town lay 80 miles southeast of LA and by the time Ragland arrived, it was dark and the search for Terry was winding down its third day. As Ragland pulled into the gravel parking lot of the market that served as the headquarters for the search, she felt something powerful. According to the AP, she said: “I literally physically turned my body all the way around like a compass and I looked at the store…and I said, He’s back there.”

 An off duty firefighter drove her to the back of the store and when Ragland saw the hay barn she’d seen in her vision, she felt she should keep going. But the property was private. Some people were sitting in the driveway and when they were asked if Ragland’s group could proceed, they gave their permission.  The people were members of Terry’s family.

 “We started to drive up this hill and it was steep, so we stopped the car and walked,” Ragland said. “All of a sudden there was a single tree and then I smelled something.”

 Ragland found Terry’s body.

 John Powers, a Riverside County sheriff’s detective, was impressed. He told KFI-AM Radio: “She actually went right up to the driveway of the hosue, onto the property, and right of to the body of his boy. Not in 23 years have I ever seen anything like this.”

 Apparently authorities have charged Terry’s 16-year-old half-brother with murder.

 I find this case compelling for many reasons. In five of my Tango Key novels –the main character is Mira Morales, a psychic and bookstore owner, a single mother, whose FBI lover, Wayne Sheppard,  gets her involved in his cases. Mira’s daughter, Annie, and her grandmother, Nadine, are also psychic. Sheppard is a diehard skeptic, a prove it to me kinda guy, and time and again, Mira proves  that she – all of us, really – receive information from what the quantum physicists call “the nonlocal,” that collective soup we can all tap into.

 This quantum soup is what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious, what David Bohm called the implicate order, what author Michael Talbott  believed was evidence that we live in a holographic universe. It’s the place that psychics go to tap in and tune in on you when you have a psychic reading. It’s where we travel in dreams, meditation, in any altered state. It’s the state of mind we drift into when we engage an oracle – the I Ching, the tarot, astrology, runes or synchronicity.

 I have recently been entertaining the possibility that synchronicity itself is a kind of oracle. It’s  the voice that we must be aware enough to hear, the manifestation we should recognize. Sometimes it’s an ally, other times it’s a pain in the neck. Sometimes it provides the proof that we should take one path and not another. Other times it teases us, tricks us into believing that something will work out just because the synchros seem to point in that direction.

In 7 Secrets of Synchronicity, one of the stories we mention involved writer and past-life researcher Carol Bowman.

Carol was visiting her mother in New York’s Hudson Valley, a small town, not much there. She had gone to the grocery store for basics. While waiting in line, she noticed the Asian woman behind her had a toddler in her cart, a cute little girl. Carol asked the woman how old her daughter was.

Asian woman: “She’ll be two next month. She’s an Aries.”

Carol: “My Aries daughter will be thirty next month. Aries kids are a handful, aren’;t they?”

Asian woman, laughing: “That’s for sure. And I’m married to an Aries.”

Carol’s antenna twitched. “Me, too!”

So we can imagine these two women in line at this dinky store, suddenly aware of some sort of connection, both with Aries daughters, both married to Aries men.

Asian woman: “I’m a Libra.”

Carol understood that something odd and fascinating was happening. “I’m a Libra, too. What’s your birthdate?”

Asian woman: “October 14.”

“That’s, uh, my birthdate, too.”

Yes, it sounds like an episode out of the Twilight Zone, weird music and all. But the upshot was that Carol handed the woman her business card and said she would be conducting a past-life workshop in the area in June. The Asian woman said she wold definitely attend.

Now: fast-forward about four years. Today,  July 3, 2013, Carol received a call from a Philadelphia woman whose therapist has recommended that she get a past-life regression. The woman looked for past-life therapists in the area and ran across Carol’s name – and suddenly remembered reading about her in 7 Secrets. A friend had given her the book a few weeks earlier and she remembered the story about Carol’s conversation with the Asian woman.

So Carol had called to thank us for the mention – which had brought her a new client.

This kind of connection is gratifying to writers. It means you’re creating ripples in this huge pond of life that positively impact other people. This woman will now experience a past-life regression with one of the pioneers in reincarnational research because a friend gave her a book with a story in it that she remembered. Technically, it may not be a synchro because there’s a causative factor – the book, 7 Secrets – but in a wider, broader picture – what are the odds?

UPDATE: Rob and I and Connie Cannon were interviewed on Whitley Strieber’s Dreamland about the unusual sighting her son had. We did a post on it here. The next link gives you the first 34 minutes of the interview. The rest of the hour is through subscription at Dreamland. The link to listen to it is here.

This little gizmo is a free iPhone app developed under a NASA program by Russell Targ at Stanford Research Institute. Targ, a physicist and a pioneer in the development of the laser, was also cofounder of the Stanford Research Institute’s investigation into psychic abilities in the 1970s and 1980s. ESP trainer helps in the development of psychic ability. From Targ’s website:

We have found that people are able to improve their ESP scores by using a machine just like this and get in touch with the part of themselves that is psychic. The player is presented with four colored squares. For each trial, one has been selected at random by the ESP Trainer. Your task is to choose the correct square. If you succeed, you will hear a chime, feel a vibration, and see a large color picture. Otherwise, the system lights up the correct square, and you proceed with the next trial. The score indicator at the top counts the number of correct choices. Words of encouragement appear as you achieve the scoring levels of 6, 8. 10, 12 or 14 hits. After 24 trials you may begin a new game.

The game offers multi-sensory feedback, reinforcement, and an opportunity to Pass, meeting all the requirements needed for learning this skill. ESP Trainer improves your ability to recognize your intuitive impressions, and it can bring you to a level of intuitive awareness beyond anything you’ve experienced before.

The purpose of the trainer is to allow you to become aware of what it feels like when you psychically choose the correct square. When you don’t have that special feeling, we encourage you to press the Pass button. (So this is not a “forced choice” test.)

The website notes that in a year-long NASA program with 145 people, many were able to significantly improve their scores. “Four of the subjects improved their scores at the hundred-to-one level or better. This approach has been used with surprising success on Wall Street.” If you continually score 12 or higher, then Targ wants to hear from you!

I downloaded it to my iPhone and Rob and I both gave it a whirl. He got 7 out of 24, I got 4 out of 24 🙁 on the first try. On subsequent attempts, I took more time. I discovered that when I held my fingers up close to the iPhone screen, but without touching it, I could sometimes sense which color held a photo, and did better than I had when I just quickly tapped away.

It’s a neat little app, something you can whip out while you’re waiting in line somewhere or just need a break from whatever you’re doing. I plan to practice until I can get 12 out of 24 – or better!

Zimmerman, who killed Treyvon Martin, a 17-year-old black kid wearing a hoodie, has been acquitted. The special prosecutor, Angela Corey, is a Republican appointed by Florida’s corrupt Republican governor, and is on TV right now, defending the tactics that her team of prosecutors took in this case.

It’s pathetic. This verdict is pathetic. But in a state that the NRA rules, where i in 17 individuals carry a weapon,  where a neighborhood volunteer like Zimmerman was allowed to carry a concealed weapon, is a travesty. The idea that race had nothing to do with this is absurd. It has everything to do with it. Sanford is a good ole boy town, deep south, as deeply south as you can get.

But perhaps, as with OJ Simpson, Zimmerman will become embroiled in something similar 13 years up the road, to the day. Or not. One way or another, the universe will balance it all out.

UPDATE: Rob and I and Connie Cannon were interviewed on Whitley Strieber’s Dreamland about the unusual sighting her son had. The link to listen to it is here.

From The New Yorker

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Recently, someone asked me why I don’t go to church. It was something of a synchro for me since I had been thinking about how when I was really young, church was not only mandatory but included a catechism class taught by Catholic nuns.

In one of these catechism classes (I think I was 12) the nun was talking about heaven and death. “When you die,” she said, “you go to one of four places: heaven, purgatory, hell, or limbo. The last was the place you went if you hadn’t been baptized to clear your soul of original sin – you know, Adam’s fooling around with Eve in the garden and grabbing that apple off the tree.

I remember thinking, Huh? That’s wrong. What happens is what we believe happens. This is all a lie. After that realization, I found a reason to be sick or extremely fatigued on  Sundays, and my younger sister bore the brunt of church and catechism.  I still had to attend occasionally, but by the time I was 16 I mustered the courage to tell my dad that I just couldn’t do church anymore, that I didn’t believe a word of it.

I thought he was going to be angry, but instead he started laughing. “Fantastic. Now I don’t have to go to church anymore.”

Now, many decades later, I see organized religion as a real detriment to our evolution as spiritual and creative beings.

In North Carolina.

In Texas.

In North Dakota.

Other states have initiated  the same types of restrictions on women’s health. Why? What is it about women’s health that drives these aging white men nuts? Well, just a simple fact: these women can conceive, give birth, have children – their children –and oh my god, your child’s life begins at conception. But never mind that once this revered child is born, it’s on its own. The Repubs  don’t want to care for this child, have public education for this child, or even acknowledge this child if he or she isn’t white. In fact, they hope to restrict women’s access to birth control.

If, in today’s Republican party, you are not white and male, then, oh sorry, you don’t count. Never mind that most of American voters are female. Never mind that Hispanics are the fastest-growing minority in this country. The Repubs are playing to some extreme, shrinking base  and if they continue on this path, they won’t qualify as a national party.

But their base is powerful. I saw it today when I went to my usual beauty salon and overheard the woman who colors and cuts my hair talking about the George Zimmerman trial.

If Treyvon Martin had been white, you can bet we wouldn’t be having this trial or discussion,”  she said.

I wanted to call her on it, wanted desperately to say, Hey, hon, guess what? Racism is alive and well in South Florida, and you are its face, its reality, its heart. But I didn’t. I wasn’t up to it. But you know what? I think it’s time for me to find a new hair stylist, like a gay guy who gets it. Or a gay woman who is raising kids with her partner. Or even a straight man or woman who understands that we, as a human collective, are  at a cross road, and that what worked for us as a people and as a country in earlier decades is no longer relevant.

If we look at these events as dreams, as our blogging friend Adelita Chirino does,  what’s the message? Are we entering the realm of Margaret Atwood’s visonary novel The Handmaid’s Tale? Or  are these events necessary steps toward some greater and more humane paradigm? Right now, in the thick of it, the answer isn’t clear.

In Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, Nobel laureate Kerry Mullis writes movingly of how he received a letter in the mail that would determine his future. If memory serves, I believe it concerned whether or not he’d been admitted to the college/graduate school of his choice. He stood there, the letter in his hand, and realized that until he opened it, until he actually read it, the content was like Schrodinger’s cat, the classic quantum physics thought experiment. The cat is trapped in the box. Is it alive or dead? You don’t know until you open the box.

Until you open the box – or the letter – there is only a wave of probability. But once you open whatever it is, that wave crashes into physical reality as a particle, as the reality. I feel like that’s where we are now as a human collective: we’re Kerry Mullis, holding that letter in our hands. We’re Erwin Schrodinger, contemplating the box that holds the trapped cat. What’s it going to be? Business as usual? A new paradigm? Or something altogether new and different?

                                                                      Emerson

  The other day, I got a call from our friend Jeri Young, whose good year blimp synchro we posted here.  She had just experienced another synchro and was eager to tell me about it.

 Her husband, Steve, had called her and suggested they meet at Panera Bread for lunch. Panera is a fast-food chain that serves terrific fresh soups, salads and sandwiches, for a reasonable price.  So they put in their order, and grabbed a table. While they were eating, Jeri noticed a saying on the wall behind Steve. It was a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson that read: Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

 At about the same moment, Steve was reading the same quote on a wall behind Jeri and called her attention to it. She glanced around, laughed, and told him to look around. “I was just reading that!”

 After they got home, Jeri picked up the mail. There was a graduation announcement from Steve’s half-sister, who is just graduating from high school. When she opened it, she found a photo of the graduating class and behind them, on the wall, was the class motto. Yes, you guessed it: the same quote by Emerson.

 We’ve been running across these types of synchronicities more frequently – where a photo is involved, almost like evidence, the giant exclamation point at the end of the cluster! Rob has affectionately called them, photo-synchros.  They sort of make you feel like what our friend Cassie Hague captured in this photo. Like, OMG!

A bunch of synchros unfolded Tuesday morning, not all good, but some very strange. The day started when I read an article on the front page of the South Florida Sun Sentinel about how the police have started using a new tool called ‘SmartWater CSI’ to nab thieves. They left a bait car unlocked with a package visible. When a thief showed up and opened the door, he touched the package and his hand was sprayed with a small amount of the chemical-laced water that leaves a stain visible only under ultra-violet light. The article included photos from a video taken when the thief opened the door.

I didn’t have time to ponder how practical this watery crime-busting tool would be, because I was in a hurry to meet a friend for an off-road bike ride. I went outside and – synchronicity – I found that MY car had been burglarized. I’d forgotten to lock it last night and someone had opened the glove box and the center console, rummaged around, and made off with the garage door opener. I couldn’t help wondering how ‘SmartWater CSI’ would help me find the person who stole the opener. Not at all that I could see.

I left our 111-pound dog Noah to watch the house, and headed out to the trail for an abbreviated ride. Trish and I had a radio show coming up  mid-morning, so one lap through the woods would be all.

I rushed home and arrived half an hour ahead of time. The radio show was scheduled with Martin Willis, host of PodcastUFO and we would talk about our book, Aliens in the Backyard. We’d already had a Mercury retrograde experience with Martin. We’d thought the interview was scheduled for Monday at 1 p.m., but apparently it was a misunderstanding. When Martin didn’t call, we went about our business. I sent him an e-mail, and he apologized for the confusion and set up the interview for the following morning.

So 10 a.m. came around and again no Martin. I checked e-mail and saw a message from him labeled CANCELLATION. Now here is where it gets a bit strange. This was the message he left.

Dear Rob & Trish,

I listened to an interview this morning with you.  I have decided that I do not want to go in the direction that you two go in. I am very sorry to have wasted all your time.  Martin

Of course, we found that puzzling. What direction are we going that he doesn’t like? we wondered. We thought maybe he’s someone who thinks the aliens are here to save us from ourselves, good guys ready to help whenever we recognize they’re here and waiting.  Aliens in the Backyard takes a more cautious approach that suggests  some aliens might be helpful, others neutral, and still others committed to enslaving or eliminating us. A complicated situation, at best.

I wrote Martin back and asked him to explain what he meant. It gets stranger. Here is what he said:

I feel bad, but I am trying to stay away from the alien thing now. I am getting a lot of flack and losing people every time I go there.  Martin

Um, Martin, hello, your podcast is about UFOs. How do you separate aliens from that topic? I wrote back something to that affect and suggested that maybe he should’ve taken note of the title of our book, if not read it. I haven’t heard any more from him.

I noticed that Martin’s website features old stories of UFO sightings from long ago. Sort of a historical tribute to ufology. One about a Maury Island sighting caught my attention, since we’d just written a post about a UFO sighting in Maury county, Tennessee. We also found out that Martin just started his PodcastUFO in May and apparently is still working out the kinks, so to speak. Apparently, he needs to add a sign on his site saying: NO ALIENS ALLOWED.

Ah, Mercury retrograde meets the aliens.

Addendum: Since the interview was cancelled, we got the garage door people out to put in a new code on our opener. Our next door neighbors were also hit and they lost two garage door openers. They called the cops and sent them our way for more Mercury retrograde nonsense…but I won’t go into that.

Mercury turns direct on July 20.

Picasso’s “Girl in the Mirror”

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A doppelganger could be that image of the girl in the mirror. It’s usually defined as a ghostly double of a living person. The idea is found in mythology, folklore,  throughout various cultures, and has been used in popular culture in movies, novels,  and TV shows. Many notable individuals have seen them – the 16^th century poet John Donne,  the 18^th century Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, another 18th century poet, Abraham Lincoln, the 16^th president of the United States, Queen Elizabeth I, and the French novelist and short story writer, Guy de Maupassant.

 It’s interesting that Donne, Goethe, and Shelley were all poets. It suggests that their imaginations were well-developed and that perhaps they were deeply attuned to other realms and dimensions. Donne was in Paris when he had his doppelganger experience – but it was of his wife, who appeared holding a baby. At about this same time, she was giving birth to a stillborn daughter. Shelley’s encounter happened in Italy, where his phantom self pointed at the Mediterranean Sea. Not long afterward, Shelley drowned in a sailing accident in the Mediterranean. He was just 29.

The encounters  both Donne and Shelley experienced were certainly precognitive – the foretelling of a future event. For both of these men, that future event spelled tragedy. For Goethe, the experience was simply deeply puzzling. It happened while he was riding on the  road to Drusenheim, a city in northeast France.  Riding toward him was his exact double, who wore a gray suit trimmed in gold. Eight years later, Goethe was traveling on the same road, but in the opposite direction. He realized he was wearing the same gray suit trimmed in gold that he had seen on his double eight years earlier. So even Goethe’s encounter  was precognitive. Can a doppelganger, then, be some sort of holographic projection from the future self? Perhaps.

Neurophysiologist Karl Pribram, along with physicist David Bohm, was one of the early pioneers of the theory that we live in a holographic universe. Or, as Michael Talbott so aptly expressed it in his brilliant book The Holographic Universe, “…there is evidence to suggest that our world and everything in it – from snowflakes to maple trees to falling stars and spinning electrons – are also only ghostly images, projections from a level of reality so beyond our own it is literally beyond both space and time.”

 And if that’s the case, if we’re living in a holographic universe, then synchronicity may be one of our most direct experiences with this deeper reality. We can reach this place “beyond time and space” in dreams, during meditation, intense physical activity/competition,  heightened creative periods, during NDEs, and through other kinds of altered states. But synchronicity may be the most easily accessible conscious experience we have of this deeper reality. If so, it behooves us to pay attention.

 In an interview in 1979 in Psychology Today, Pribram  noted that it isn’t that the world of appearances is wrong. “…it isn’t that there aren’t objects  out there, at one level of reality. It’s that if you penetrate through and look at the universe with a holographic system, you arrive at a different view, a different reality. And that other reality can explain things that have hitherto remained inexplicable scientifically: paranormal phenomena, synchronicities, the apparently meaningful coincidence of events.”

Doppelgangers – and synchronicities – may also be projections from probable realities. In the early 1960s, author and mystic Jane Roberts (The Seth Material) and her husband, Robert Butts, began experimenting with a Ouija board as part of Jane’s research into ESP. It quickly became apparent to them that the material/information that came from the Ouija entity – Seth- was profound. Not long afterward, they stopped using the Ouija board and Jane began channeling Seth and Rob started transcribing these sessions. At some point between then and when they began writing the first book- The Seth Material – Jane and Rob took a break one night to go dancing.

During that evening, Jane suddenly spotted a dancing couple who looked so similar to herself and Rob that she drew her husband’s attention to the couple.  They were heavier than either Jane or Rob, didn’t look happy, had a kind of grimness about them that disturbed her. She later realized the man and woman were probable versions of herself  and Rob, the version they might have become if they  hadn’t pursued the unknown path that led them to Seth.

What else lies in this deeper reality? I suspect there are gems we haven’t discovered, truths we haven’t uncovered,  and places we haven’t even imagined. Yet.