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Like attracts like. That must be the best explanation for why Bruce Gernon met someone with a similar story to his mind-blowing leap of 100-miles while piloting a plane across the Bermuda Triangle. In this second case, however, the teleporter was not in an airplane and wasn’t even on land! He was actually underwater in a submarine.

Bruce was eating dinner at a sports bar a few years ago when he noticed a man on the opposite side of the horseshoe staring at him. The man whispered something to the bartender, who then came over to Gernon and asked if he was the pilot who had had the strange Bermuda Triangle experience. When Gernon said he was, the bartender told him the gentleman across the bar said he worked at AUTEC – the secret navy base on Andros Island in the Bahamas – and would like to talk to him.

Since there was an open seat next to the man during the crowded dinner hour, Gernon joined the stranger. The man, who was wearing a t-shirt with an AUTEC logo emblazoned on it, told Gernon that he was still employed at the secret navy base and wasn’t going to tell him his name. (We’ll call him Earl.) He said he’d had two unusual experiences during his time working as a civilian employee, but was only willing to tell Gernon one of the stories.

Earl explained he was working as an engineer on a submarine near the south end of the Tongue of the Ocean when the electronic equipment suddenly acted as if it were possessed.  It was as if they had entered a space where the known laws of physics collapsed. Several seconds passed, then everything returned to normal. Everything except that they were now near the north end of the Tongue of the Ocean, about 100 miles from where they had been moments earlier. No one could explain what had happened.

Gernon was fascinated and could only imagine what the second story—the one Earl wouldn’t talk about – must involve. Even though the incident took place deep below the surface, Gernon was fascinated by the similarity to his own encounter in the Bermuda Triangle that began on Andros Island,  where AUTEC is located. Gernon, like Earl, experienced an apparent leap of 100 miles after his electronic equipment malfunctioned.

We learned of a third case of a 100-mile teleportation from Charlotte Kosa, host of California Haunts, an Internet radio show. When Charlotte interviewed us recently, she mentioned her own experience. She and a friend were driving on a highway outside of Sacramento when she became confused about where she was. The surroundings looked all wrong and the signs and cars and buildings seemed as if they were from a different time – possibly the 1960s. A short time later, she came to a town and everything seemed back to normal. Except for one thing. She and her friend now found themselves 100 miles from where they had been just minutes earlier.

Maybe the 100-mile figure is insignificant, simply the synchro that ties the three teleportation stories together. But what could be the source of these experiences, what do they mean, and how often do such incidents take place? Is it simply to nudge our awareness and remind us that the everyday world with it’s physical laws is not the only reality? I’m curious because a few years ago, I also had a teleportation experience, though not one that covered 100 miles.

In my case, I was driving to a dentist appointment and was slowed by highway construction. A voice in my head said, ‘Look where you are and look at the time.’ I did so, thinking it was my subconscious mind reflecting my concern about arriving on time for the appointment.

I got past the road work, picked up speed, and started looking for familiar landmarks. I thought I would be passing a shopping center with a Home Depot at any moment before I reached Southern Boulevard, where I would turn. But the landscape didn’t look right. Instead of open land, there were tall pines on either side of the street and houses. I was no longer in a commercial-zoned area, and I was confused.

Then my jaw dropped as I came to Southern Boulevard, but at an intersection several miles from where I’d been moments earlier. To reach that point would’ve required taking a U-turn and retracing my path.  It would’ve taken at least ten minutes. I looked at my watch and I still had the same amount of time to get to the dentist. Oddly enough, I was now almost as close to the dentist’s office as I had been, but now I was approaching from a different direction. I arrived on time, even though if I’d actually driven the route, I would’ve been ten or fifteen minutes late.

As I stepped into the dentist’s office, I knew I was back in the everyday world.

What are the chances that we would hear three unrelated stories about human teleportation, and all three would involve instant movement of 100 miles? Whether or not the distance was exactly 100 miles is immaterial. More interesting is the fact that all three people used that figure as the distance. We consider this story a synchronicity, even though we heard the stories over several years. Time, we’ve decided, is not a primary factor in synchronicity if the meaningful coincidence is astonishing and a highly unlikely confluence of similar events.

The stories come from a pilot, a submarine crew member, and a talk radio show host. We’ll start with the pilot.

When Bruce Gernon flew his Bonanza into the heart of the Bermuda Triangle phenomenon in December 1970, he encountered a series of unusual incidents like nothing he had ever experienced. In brief, the flight began from Andros Island in the Bahamas and within a few minutes he skirted around a flying saucer-shaped lenticular cloud. Such clouds are usually found at 20,000 feet or more and are stationary.

But as soon as he passed the cloud, it shape-shifted into a huge, billowy white cloud and appeared to be chasing the plane. They climbed at a thousand feet per minute, and cloud built up underneath the plane at the same rate, then engulfed the plane. Gernon escaped and was engulfed again several times until he broke free. By then the cloud had projected two huge arms forming a semi-circle. Up ahead, Gernon spotted another cumulus-shaped cloud that also was sending out arms and linking with the former lenticular cloud to form a gigantic puffy donut in the sky.

Gernon and his two passengers were trapped inside the 15-mile wide donut hole. They couldn’t fly either over or under the cloud, which rose out of the ocean to an altitude of 60,000 feet. Finally, they noticed an opening where two of the arms were converging and flew toward it. By the time they reached the opening, it appeared as a tunnel that was collapsing.

They flew through it and out into a milky haze and as they exited the tunnel the challenging flight turned into a bizarre and dangerous one. First, for about 10 seconds they felt as if they were weightless with only the seatbelts holding them down. All the electronic instruments were malfunctioning and the two compasses were spinning about.

They had flown this routes several times and knew they were close to the Bimini chain of islands, about a hundred miles from Miami when they contacted the Miami Tower. Oddly, the air traffic controller couldn’t locate them anywhere on radar. After a couple of minutes of radio silence, the controller came back on and said there was a plane coming in over Miami Beach. That was impossible. Yet, the clouds cleared and below them was Miami Beach.

Bruce and his two passengers checked their watches and were baffled. They had literally skipped ahead 100 miles. Gernon thought they had time-traveled and that was how we wrote it in THE FOG, which we co-authored. They had arrived in 47 minutes rather the 75 minutes that the flight usually took. They’d gained 28 minutes and had too much fuel remaining. It was as if they didn’t fly that last hundred miles, but instead were instantly projected 100 miles.

While the experience could be viewed as time travel, I now find the term teleportation as more appropriate and also easier to understand – if not to comprehend. Tomorrow will be part two of this story in which we’ll relate two more teleportation stories, both of them involving the same distance – 100 miles.

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!