Welcome to The Mystical Underground

Fair warning: no synchro in this post. Well, maybe there is, buried somewhere.

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Our animal companions occupy a special place in our lives. They love us unconditionally, trust that we will love them back in kind and take care of their needs. In September 2011,  our daughter, Megan was living at home, and asked if she could adopt a puppy from a dog rescue organization in our area.  The puppy she settled on was a border collie/lab mix (we think) whom she named Nika.

Our golden retriever, Noah,  took to her instantly. They played together, slept together, and until she was big enough to stand up to bullies at the dog park, Noah defended her. A deep bond developed between them.

When Megan moved to Orlando for her Disney internship, we kept Nika because she was living in a high rise in downtown Orlando and working 8-10 hours a day. During our frequent visits, it was always obvious that Nika regarded Megan as her human. She loved us and Noah, no question, but when Megan walked into the house, Nika went nuts. And when Megan left again or we drove back home after a visit, Nika seemed out of sorts.

This little bundle of joy burrowed her way into my heart. Everything for Nika is about curiosity, joy, exploration. She doesn’t run, she hops. She doesn’t just race into the dog park to greet her friends, she tears in there, her tail whipping from side to side. And when she encounters a dog who is not so friendly, she instantly falls to the ground, rolls onto her back, and offers up her belly as if to say, Hey, dude, be my friend, okay? And she’s like that with humans, too. She loves everyone.

In June, when Megan’s Disney internship ended, she decided to start a dog walking business.  Her area is perfect for it – lots of high rises inhabited by young professionals who all have dogs that spend eight hours alone while their humans work. Nika went to live with Megan and Ollie, her roommate’s dachshund.

Noah’s world suddenly shrank.  He sort of moped around the house, didn’t run and play at the dog park, and was certainly less active than when Nika had been around. I’m convinced that Noah sank into a kind of depression. Whenever the two of them got together after a separation, their love for each was palpable. One time, Nika literally jumped out of window of Megan’s car to get to Noah.

All day today (August 3), I’ve been feeling out of sorts without knowing quite why – one of those days when you feel antsy, restless, for no apparent reason. So tonight we’re at dinner with friends, talking about an app we hope to develop, and get a call from Megan. Nika has been attacked by a pitt bull, in the elevator of the building where Megan lives.

Megan is totally freaked out, Nika is covered in blood, and the elevator and hallway are saturated in so much blood, she says, that it looks like the scene of a murder. I tell her to get Nika into the  shower so she can see where she’s injured.  After numerous phone calls, Megan says that Nika has a deep puncture wound in her neck and she and a friend are rushing her to an emergency veterinary clinic.

The upshot of all this? Nika went into surgery for the wound in her neck, the parents of the young woman who owns the pitt bull marched down to the concierge desk and insisted on  knowing who the “other dog” was, because that dog (Nika) was at  fault.  The concierge refused to give them Megan’s name; she was standing right there as the parents went on about this.

Megan blurted, “I own the other dog and she would never hurt anything or anyone.”

Matt, the concierge, said, “You need to see the security video,” and played it for them. It clearly showed the pitt bull lunging for Nika, grabbing her at the throat. The father said they would “help pay for Nika’s vet bill.”

$1200 and change.  Really? Think again, my friend.You’re going to be footing the entire bill.

The pitt is being taken away tomorrow by the county’s animal control shelter. Any time a police report is filed about a pitt bull, this is what happens.  I have to say that I feel bad for the pitt. This species fills animal care facilities all over Florida. Most of them are euthanized. As our friends said tonight after Megan’s call, “They are lovable dogs. But they can turn on you in a flash and when they do that, they are wild, uncontainable.”

Please keep Nika in your thoughts.

a santero’s altar

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Iowa Republican Steven King (no relation to the novelist King!)  penned a bill called the “English Language Unity Act,” which would declare English as the official language of the United States.  This guy also defends dog fighting, okay?

So the bill was taken up in a subcommittee hearing in Congress today – August 2. To make his opposition clear, Michigan Democrat John Conyers delivered his speech on the subject – in Spanish.

This evening on Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC, this bill was the lead story, with  the words TRABAJOS, TRABAJOS, TRABAJOS  in the background.

The word trabajos  literally translates as jobs. The Republicans are always talking about creating jobs and about how ending the Bush tax cuts on the top one percent would be a job killer, as though extreme wealth is synonymous with job creation. The facts say otherwise.  According to Bloomberg,  “fewer than 1 percent of the U.S. population have annual income of more than $1 million. In the top two tax brackets, slightly more than one-third — 35.5 percent — were employers receiving business income, according to 2007 figures from the Treasury Department.”

Now, among a certain faction of Cubans – and here’s the trickster synchro –  the word trabajos means something else entirely. A trabajo is a ritual that a santero – a practitioner of Santeria, a Cuban mystical religion – performs for a specific purpose. The santero or santera usually goes into trance to perform a trabajo and his or her spirit guides are the ones who actually tackle the problem.

In Santeria, everything is believed to be the result of spiritual forces, and saints or orishas whom the santero calls upon for help are really the guys in charge.  So when a santero’s spirit guides go to work (trabajar) on the spirits that are causing your problems,  it’s as if your body and soul become a spiritual battleground. As the santero’s spirit guides intervene with these malign forces, anything can be mitigated: health problems, love and romance issues, career and financial challenges, karma, even spirit attachment and possession.

When we saw those words on Rachel’s show – TRABAJOS, TRABAJOS, TRABAJOS – we burst out laughing.  It was as if she were saying that the Republican party is badly in need of the kind of spiritual intervention that only a santero can perform, and  santeros are, oops, usually Latinos, who under King’s bill would be required to learn English before they could do anything in this country. It’s as if the Republican Party is possessed by some sort of malign spirit that screams for domination and control.

“They need Ruben to intervene,” Rob said.

“Or Nelly.”

Ruben and Nelly, a Cuban santero and a santera whom we got to know during our early years as freelance magazine writers, are a post for another day. But the trickster is definitely busy during this election season in the U.S.

Before they were called flying saucers or UFOs, they were known as ‘ghost rockets.’ At least, that was the name one type of mysterious flying object was called when they were seen by thousands in northern Europe in the mid-1940s.

The term has not been in common use for decades, so when I heard ‘ghost rockets’ mentioned recently during an e-mail exchange with a former employee of AUTEC, the secret navy base in the Bahamas, I had to Google it to find out more.

About 2,000 sightings were logged between May and December 1946, with peaks on 9 and 11 August 1946. Two hundred sightings were verified with radar returns, and authorities recovered physical fragments which were attributed to ghost rockets.  Cameras weren’t prevalent as today, so that the above photo is the only known one of a ghost rocket.

At the time the ghost rockets were attributed either to meteor showers or long-range tests by the Russians of captured German V-1 or V-2 missiles. However, some investigators for the Swedish military apparently believed the objects could not be conventionally explained, and instead hypothesized an extraterrestrial origin.

Here’s a part of a formerly top secret USAFE (United States Air Force Europe) document from November 4, 1948.

“For some time we have been concerned by the recurring reports on flying saucers. They periodically continue to pop up; during the last week, one was observed hovering over Neubiberg Air Base for about thirty minutes. They have been reported by so many sources and from such a variety of places that we are convinced that they cannot be disregarded and must be explained on some basis which is perhaps slightly beyond the scope of our present intelligence thinking.

“When officers of this Directorate recently visited the Swedish Air Intelligence Service, this question was put to the Swedes. Their answer was that some reliable and fully technically qualified people have reached the conclusion that ‘these phenomena are obviously the result of a high technical skill which cannot be credited to any presently known culture on earth’. They are therefore assuming that these objects originate from some previously unknown or unidentified technology, possibly outside the earth.”

The document ended with the statement that “we are inclined not to discredit entirely this somewhat spectacular theory [extraterrestrial origins], meantime keeping an open mind on the subject.”

 Notice that the date of the document is 1948 and of American origin. As a result, the term flying saucer was used instead of ghost rocket. That’s because on June 24, 1947, private pilot Kenneth Arnold  reported a string of nine, shiny unidentified flying objects soaring past Mount Rainer at a minimum of 1,200 miles an hour. Arnold’s description of saucer-like objects led to the coining of the new term–flying saucer. His report is usually referred to as the first modern era UFO sightings, and was followed by numerous reported sightings over the next two to three weeks.

While ghost rockets were a WWII-era term, Curt Rowlett, the former AUTEC employee mentioned above, used it to describe a sighting. Here is what he had to say:

“On one voyage on an AUTEC vessel in the summer of 1985, we were underway in the channel between the north end of Andros Island and Grand Bahama Island, bound for a port in West Palm Beach, Florida.

“During the midnight to four o’clock a.m. watch, my watch partner and I sighted what I would later describe in a Strange Magazine article as two “ghost rockets” that flew side by side over our ship on a west to east trajectory.  These “rockets” were highly unusual as neither made any sound, were traveling at an oddly slow rate of speed, and left behind contrails that glowed brightly and which were “multi-colored,” in that the contrail smoke changed from white to green to blue to pink and then disappeared completely after about ten minutes.  (I estimate that they passed over us at an altitude of about 500 to 1000 feet; both rockets were white-colored and perhaps 50 to 100 feet in length).

“I never have been able to determine with 100% certainty whether or not those rockets were a part of some sort of secret Navy submarine or destroyer test being conducted in the area; I have always assumed that they were not and for good reason. As an AUTEC vessel, we would definitely have been informed that such a test was being undertaken and subsequently, warned to stay out of the area.  This had always been the Navy’s practice during similar rocket firing tests that I witnessed while working at sea in the same area.

“After returning from the voyage, I asked a friend at the AUTEC base who worked as a sort of “air and ocean traffic controller” about the incident.  He told me that he had no knowledge of any sort of test-firing of rockets on that night and due to the sensitive nature of his job, he certainly would have been in a position to know.  (And as a very close friend of mine, he would have told me even if it was supposed to be top secret.)

“Again, I have never heard any satisfactory explanation as to exactly what it was we saw that night.  I have also never heard of rockets that travel in such close proximity to each other, i.e., the side by side flight that we witnessed, or at such an unusually slow speed.  Students of Fortean subject matter will of course remember that there is a known history of so-called ghost rocket sightings in other parts of the world.”

Finally, ghost rockets live on into the late ’90s as the name of a New Jersey bluegrass band.

NASA satellite images of Greenland ice melt

Everyone is feeling it this summer – a massive drought in the U.S. Midwest, sweltering temperatures in much of the country, an uncharacteristically wet summer in the U.K.  According to NASA, in fact, more than 40,000 heat records have been broken in 2012.

An article in the Christian Science Monitor   spells it out clearly:  the first five months of 2012 were the hottest on record in the contiguous United States. In June, 164 all-time high temperature records were tied or broken around the country, according to government records.

The news from NASA is even worse. For several days in July, Greenland’s  surface ice cover melted over a larger period than at any point in 30 years of satellite observations.  “On average in the summer, about half of the surface of Greenland’s ice sheet naturally melts. At high elevations, most of that melt water quickly refreezes in place. Near the coast, some of the melt water is retained by the ice sheet and the rest is lost to the ocean. But this year the extent of ice melting at or near the surface jumped dramatically. According to satellite data, an estimated 97 percent of the ice sheet surface thawed at some point in mid-July.”

The melt is causing sea levels to rise – definitely a concern for all coastal areas. Here in South Florida, we’re only about three feet above sea level. In mid-July, an iceberg twice the size of Manhattan – about 46 square miles – broke off from the  Petermann Glacier. Andreas Muenchow, a professor at the University of Delaware, calls it “dramatic, disturbing. We have data for 150 years and we see changes that we have not seen before.”

Take a look at the map of the U.S. created by Dr. Chet Snow, who co-authored Mass Dreams of the Future with Helen Wambaugh.  It depicts what the U.S. will look like after massive earth changes. The map was based on information gleaned from hundreds of hypnotic progressions to the future that Wambaugh conducted with volunteers.  The dates for this map are, so far, wrong: 1998-2012.

We wrote about Wambaugh’s work and our personal experience with an hypnotic progression in a post called Domed City, which coincided with one of the future scenarios the volunteers experienced during their progressions.   Even though the dates for Snow’s map are wrong, it certainly seems that the earth changes are already underway, that global warming is here.   Arguments persist that we humans have not contributed to global warming, that it’s all just a cycle in nature. But with 7 billion people on the planet, all leaving a heavy carbon footprint, that argument strikes me as specious.

Have a look at this video taken by an Australian tourist viewing a glacier near Ilulissat, Greenland as an iceberg broke off.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=HB3K5HY5RnE

The universe works in mysterious ways. Indeed.

The Ouija Board comes into play in this story – and in an odd way!

This story was referenced in an article in Psychology Today called the Sixth Sense and it undoubtedly  outraged skeptics, lawyers and judges. It involves a jury and how a few of the members investigated the case on their own. We found it hilarious. After all, jurors are given strict guidelines, but apparently no one told these jurors that seances were off-limits.

In  1994, Stephen Young, an insurance broker, went on trial in England for the shootings of Harry and Nicola Fuller at their cottage in Wadhurst, East Sussex, in February of the previous year. Young was deeply in debt and the newlyweds had lots of cash stored in their house.

On the night of the first day of trial, several jurors had drinks together and afterwards four of them created a makeshift Ouija board and attempted to contact one of the victims. To their surprise, Harry Fuller joined their party and told them that Young was the murderer.  “I was crying  by this time, and the other ladies were  upset as well,” one juror later commented. The next morning they reported their findings to the other jurors. When the judge found out about the Ouija session, he ordered a mistrial.

Young was retried later that year and found guilty, this time by evidence only from living witnesses.

These types of UFOs are called plasma UFOs, and this one is truly strange. I almost get seasick watching the video. The person who took it provides some details about where and when. Check out the comments. Watching this, it seems more like a lifeform of some kind rather than a machine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1MNI74oS5pw#!

Our friend Carol Bowman sent us these photos, reminders that we are surrounded by beauty, something we often forget in the daily hustle of life.