Welcome to The Mystical Underground

…then fool me again.

And it almost happened. At least for a few minutes, I took two recent bogus Internet stories seriously, probably because I wanted them to be true so I could write cool blog posts.

But the first thing in both cases that alerted me that these stories might be made up was a little question in the back of my head.  Why hadn’t I heard about this before now? Well, interesting things do happen that we miss, even if our antennas for news of the weird are usually extended. And these two bits of news definitely fit  in that category.

The first one comes from a little known news outlet called Rock City Times in Arkansas. I noticed the link to this story on a podcast website on Jan. 2. It was fresh news from New Year’s Eve. In fact, the event in question—a massive die-off of red-winged black birds that fell from the sky over a one-mile area– occurred close to the stroke of midnight. There have been other mass deaths of birds reported and it seemed that this one was the most recent. I was hooked…well, at least for a while.

To my astonishment, the story said that this was the fourth year in a row that red-winged black birds had fallen in mass on New Year’s eve on this town. I did not know that. But this event was far and above the worst case ever reported. Supposedly, 18 million black birds simultaneously plummeted to their deaths. How, I wondered, had they come up with the number so quickly?

The story quoted a local couple who had witnessed the plague of dead birds, and a meteorologist who said several clouds of birds had been spotted on radar before the big plunge. An ornithologist suggested the death-dive indicated that this species of black bird was going extinct, that a mere 500 red-winged black birds remained. How did he know that?  Somehow, the scientist even knew that the birds had come from distant places, turning the small town of Bebe, Arkansas into Jonestown of the bird world.

Amazing, I thought. Great story for the blog, and started putting together a quick post when suddenly my computer froze. My Mac Pro had never simply stopped functioning. I couldn’t type. I couldn’t escape the page. I couldn’t do anything but restart the computer. Fortunately, that worked and I was back in action. But before returning to the blog post, I was distracted by various household ditties and it was a few hours before I sat back down and I discovered my post had vanished. And I’d just told Trish I’d found a very interesting story earlier, but oddly, very oddly, I couldn’t remember a thing about it.

I clicked onto my Internet history for the day, and fortunately I wasn’t hallucinating. There it was—the Rock City Times story of massive death of blackbirds. This time I took a closer look and noticed that below the name of the publication was a curious line: Arkansas’ 2^nd Most Unreliable News Source.

I realized I’d been had by a satirical web site, a protégé of The Onion, which has produced fake news for years and fooled untold numbers of readers…at least for awhile.

Fortunately, synchronicity saved me.  My computer simply froze at the moment of truth. The post was never written. But, hey, at least I got something out of it—an alternative post about how stupid I almost was.

I’ve left out the other part of the story. Yes, another web site almost blind-sided me earlier that same day. It features a really interesting, well-written article that amazingly combined my interest in archaeology and the UFO/alien scenario. I’ll go into that one in the next day or two. Fool me twice…and my computer stops working.

Many spiritual texts talk about appreciation, about how it’s a powerful aspect of mindfulness, of living in the moment. So when Rob and I arrived at the dog park the other day, I asked myself how I could appreciate the dog park.

Okay. First off, our golden retriever loves coming here. This place is where he gets to run free – no leash – and to hunt for squirrels along the fence and to chase balls and Frisbee that Rob throws him. This park is where, during the hot summer months, someone brings plastic kid swimming pools and all the dogs plop down in these pools to cool off. The dog park is where you, the dog, are allowed to be, well, a dog.

Noah has a routine once he enters the park. I can appreciate that. I have my routines, too. His routines involve smells; mine involve words. Both get us to that same place.

Some days, Noah is interested only in squirrels, parallel to the days when my interests are primarily with whatever I’m writing. Other days, Noah is strictly focused on the ball or Frisbee that Rob tosses him. Or, he wants to mingle with  dogs and could care less about ball and Frisbees.  On those days, I tend to receive more emails, Twitter followers, more Facebook friend requests.

Then there are the days when Noah throws his weight around, 110 pounds of muscle and speed who dislikes Boxers, German Shepherds, and large poodles who get in his face. On those days, I tend to feel impatient or irritated and he reflects it.

On this particular day, though, Noah was most interested in sniffing his way along the periphery of the fence, as he’s doing in the above photo. He’s presumably hunting for squirrels, and Rob and I followed him.

The acacia trees were in full, glorious bloom, the branches hanging low enough so that I could actually touch the flowers. One of these blossoms captivated me and I stood there a few moments, touching it, admiring the colors, appreciating the perfection of it all. Then I snapped a photo of it with my phone and it became the thing I appreciated most about that day.

A week or so later, we were at the dog park after a big thunderstorm and heard the squawking of wild parrots. They apparently like the seeds in one of the trees that provide shade for the humans and I snapped this photo:

So now my daily habit is to find at least one thing to appreciate. When I do that, my perceptions are altered and everywhere I look, I see something or someone to appreciate.

 When Megan was home during the Christmas holidays, we did a girl thing that involved four hours at Angie’s place, for hair stuff. Angie has the lead story in chapter 6 of our new book, The Synchronicity Highway.

Angie is now living with Ed, the Brazilian guy in her synchro, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Jean Luc Picard in Star Trek. The hours he keeps are probably as weird as Jean Luc’s, too. Ed gets up at 4:30 a.m. to deliver bread to various large markets, and gets off around noon, then goes back to bed for several hours, wakes up for the evening, and goes back to bed around 9:30 or 10 p.m. But hey, when you’re directing the Enterprise through the outer reaches of space, your hours are going to be weird.

While Megan and I were at Angie’s apartment and Ed emerged from the bedroom from his afternoon siesta and smiled hello, I saw the resemblance to Jean Luc in the smile, the bald head, the eyes.

“Okay, here’s a weird thing,” I said to Angie. “At Starbucks, Home Depot, at random places, people tell Rob that he resembles Walter in Breaking Bad.”

 And you know, he does. Bald is in these days, But ladies, be forewarned. Bald does not understand why you spend money getting your hair cut, tended to, dyed, straightened.

For Rob and Walter, Ed and Jean Luc, we have a Doppelganger explanation. It’s not just the bald heads. For Ed and Jean Luc, the similarity lies in the smile, I think. For Rob and Walter, I think the similarity lies in the eyes. It’s weird. I’m not sure sure what Doppelgangers are in the grander scheme of things,  but there’s no question that they exist.

 Just ask Mike Perry , whose Doppelganger experiences we wrote about in The Synchronicity Highway. 

If you click the link below, you’ll see a video of a man who clicks his tongue to see. He’s called the Bat Man.

echolation

In going though our early archives, I ran across one of my favorite synchronicity stories. We originally posted this on February 25, 2009. This synchronicity happened to Dr. L Darryl Armstrong, It beautifully illustrates what can happen when we feel strongly connected to a particular place.
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Several years ago during the first days of establishing our business, I had the occasion to work on the west coast and visit a friend in Carmel. Having always wanted to tour the area, especially Big Sur, and to get a massage at Esalen one day, I trucked off to just spend some time driving and exploring the coastal highway.

By chance I happened upon a real estate sign noting a house for sale or rent, I don’t recall which. The “house” was actually a large cabin – 2 stories that hung off the side of a cliff with the most remarkable view of the Pacific Ocean I have ever seen from a private residence. It was obvious someone had spent a great deal of their personal time and money carving out this homestead. I was mesmerized, and could imagine what life might be like in a “cabin by the sea”. Every time since then, when I have been out that way, I have driven by the cabin. These days it has a fence on the road and a gate but you can still get a glimpse.

A few years later, late one evening, I crawled on to a Southwestern flight headed home to “my own cabin in the woods” on Lake Barkley in Kentucky. I don’t recall where I was flying from, maybe Phoenix. Anyway, I got my always enjoyable exit row seat and stretched out because I was exhausted.

I normally “hibernate” on a plane and rarely strike up conversations as I prefer to read, work or sleep. The plane was not very full but sure enough this fellow chooses to sit in the exit row with me. For some reason I was drawn to his smile and immediately liked him. Eventually my southern hospitality overcame me, I guess, and I offered him a drink since I had plenty of coupons and he smiled and offered me one as well.

We chatted and I found out he was from California. We started talking about how we both liked certain areas (I mentioned Big Sur, Carmel, Monterrey) and when I got to the story about the cabin on the side of the road overlooking the ocean he got a strange expression on his face.

I thought nothing of it. I just continued describing the setting and how much I would love to live there with the view and the peace and quiet despite all the inconveniences. He finally said something to the effect, ‘You know, I understand how you feel. We obviously both work hard and have a lot of stress. It sounds like when we get home we are both ‘hermits’ in parts of our lives. I have always enjoyed my peace and solitude as well. Let me show you where I live.’

And this man, whom I had never met and yet instantly took a liking to, reaches into his brief case and pulls out a photo wallet. And yes, you guessed it. This was the man who owned the cabin I have always cherished in my mind. We were both surprised yet it seemed as if a “loop” had been closed because I left the plane that night knowing that someone I could share mutual empathy with enjoyed the “cabin by the sea” as much as I did.

This is a post about appreciation.

In the summer of 2000, during a Mercury retrograde, we moved to our present home. The move itself was pretty much a disaster, trying to close on two homes on the same day and to move all our stuff. It included several thousand books, pets, and my dad, who was in a wheelchair at the time, with Parkinson’s. Our neighbors were a single mom with two young boys.

Megan and the oldest boy became good friends, but his mother had some strange concepts about animals. In the five years they were our neighbors, she went through numerous pets – dogs, birds, rodents – and discarded them as though they were Kleenex.

Her last dog, a gorgeous German shepherd she’d imported from Germany, lost out when a guy moved in who eventually became her second husband.  She stopped exercising the dog and his hips went bad and she simply had him put down. A few days before she and her new husband were going to move, she told me she was going to release her son’s guinea pig into the wild. I told her that was cruel. The guinea pig had never been wild. I convinced her to give me the rodent and I eventually took it to a pet store and it was sold to a family that really wanted a guinea pig.

After they left, a new family moved in and for nearly 10 years now, they have been the best neighbors we’ve ever had, anywhere, ever. Annette is a Gemini, like me, born on the same day as my friend and script co-author, Hilary Hemingway. She’s a nut, like me, about animals. They have two dogs and two cats, mice, fish, and two snakes. Her husband, Kevin, is a commercial airline pilot and can fix anything. Their son is probably going to be a famous biologist some day and their daughter is a gem, who periodically drops by to ask for something good to read.

When we go away, Annette and her kids take care of our cats. When she goes away, we take care of her critters. But I don’t do snakes. They creep me out. I mean, I’ll do them if Annette and her family are going to be gone for an extended period, but it’s not my favorite thing.

Annette is an identical twin and she and her sister have had some stunning synchros over the years, especially in the telepathic area, and we’ve posted some of them and used a couple of their stories in our synchronicity books.

Annette, like her daughter, is a big reader and has pretty much exhausted the MacGregor library. She has a great eye for what works in a novel and I’m going to give her this current novel to read after Rob goes through it. A fresh perspective can’t hurt.

There is something comforting about meeting up with someone you like in the space between your yards, and sharing stuff from any given day. When we meet between our houses, our dogs invariably play, with Noah chasing Fergie, their German short-haired pointer, around the yard, the two of them playing tug-of-war with a stick, a Frisbee. Quite often, Annette’s orange tiger cat darts into our house for some catnip and Copper looks so much like our orange tiger, Simba, that I mistake one for the other.

What I have learned from good neighbors is that you never know where the friendship will lead. Given my political leanings, it’s strange that Annette is the only Republican woman with whom I have any interaction at all. We are at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of politics, but in terms of kids, animals, and life in general, we seem to be on the same weird page.

A time travel story to start the new year:

In 1911, a book called An Adventure was published by Anne Moberly, an English schoolmistress, and Eleanor Jourdain, about an experience they’d had a decade earlier at Versailles, a palace near Paris that was once the home of French kings.

It was the summer of 1901 and the two women traveled to Paris for two weeks of sightseeing in and  around the city. On August 10,  they traveled to Versailles by train for two weeks of sightseeing. It was Moberly’s first trip to Paris and Jourdain’s second. At the time, Moberly was head of a women’s residential hall at Oxford University and Jourdain was considering a job as her assistant. The women felt the trip would allow them to get to know each other.

In Versailles, they toured the palace and then decided to walk to the Petit Trianon, once home to Marie Antoinette. The Petite Trianon and its park are indelibly linked to the memory of Antoinette.  According to the Versailles website: “She is the only queen to have imposed her personal taste on Versailles. Sweeping away the old court and its traditions, she insisted on living as she wished. In her Trianon domain, which Louis XVI gave her in 1774, she found the heaven of privacy that enabled her to escape from the rigours of court etiquette. Nobody could come there without her invitation.”

The day was breezy for August and the two women set out and strolled through the tremendous formal garden and then headed into a wooded area. They had a guidebook with them, but even so, when they emerged from the woods,  they found themselves at the wrong building – the Grand Trianon. After consulting their guidebook again, they started up a path that appeared to lead to the Petit Trianon. Moberly noticed a woman shaking a cloth from the window of a building they passed, but didn’t stop to ask for directions.

The grounds were curiously empty of tourists, but the women came upon two somber-looking men  in green coats and three-cornered hats. They appeared to be gardeners; a wheelbarrow and spade were nearby. Jourdain, who spoke French, asked which path led to the Petit Trianon and the men answered.  But their reply was so mechanical that Jourdain repeated her question and received the same answer.

A woman and girl were standing in the doorway or a nearby cottage and Jourdain noticed  their old-fashioned clothes. She didn’t say anything to Moberly and they continued along the path the men had indicated.

At this point, Moberly suddenly felt deeply depressed and her depression increased by the moment. She didn’t say anything to Jourdain,  who was experiencing a profound sense of loneliness and felt like she was sleepwalking. She didn’t say anything about how she was feeling, either.  They followed the path until it intersected yet another path. Directly ahead of them, in the shadows of a dense wooded area, stood a kiosk, where a cloaked man was seated.

Oddly, it was no longer breezy and the air felt strangely ominous and claustrophobic. Moberly later wrote that everything around her “suddenly looked unnatural, therefore unpleasant; even the trees  behind the building seemed to have become flat and lifeless, like a wood worked in tapestry. There were no effects of light and shade, and no wind stirred the trees. It was all intensely still.”

The man looked at the women but Jourdain felt he wasn’t really looking at them. Moberly felt the man’s face was repulsive, odious. They hurried on and eventually caught sight of the Petit Trianon. Moberly thought it looked more like an elegant country house rather than a royal establishment.  Near a terrace that wrapped around the house, Moberly saw a woman who appeared to be sketching.  She wore old-fashioned clothes – a broad-brimmed white hat and a low-cut dress with a full skirt.

They reached the terrace  and made their way around the courtyard and into a French wedding party – where everyone was dressed in 20^th century clothing. Their somber moods and the oppressive feeling in the air dissipated.

The two women didn’t discuss their experience until a week later, when Moberly asked Jourdain if she thought the Petit Trianon was haunted. She said she did think it was haunted. Once they began discussing their experiences, they were shocked to discover that Jourdain hadn’t seen the seated woman sketching in the garden. Even more startling was their discovery that August 10, the day they had visited, was a pivotal date in French history – on that day in 1792, revolutionary forces had arrested the royal family. That arrest was the beginning of the end for Marie Antoinette. This could explain the feelings of depression and oppression both women experienced.

They later wrote up their individual accounts of the experience and uncovered other discrepancies about what each of them had seen or not seen. They tracked down dozens of documents, including a map drawn by the queen’s architect that suggested a cottage had stood where Jourdain had seen one.  An architectural record from 1780 noted a small columned structure that the women though might have been the kiosk they’d seen.

In 1965, psychic researcher G.W. Lambert proposed that the two women had a genuine experience with retrocognition – backward knowing – but got the dates wrong. His research suggested they saw events from 1770 instead of 1789. A biographer, Philippe Julian, discovered that a flamboyant poet and his friends often rehearsed historical plays near the Petit Trianon and concluded the women had stumbled into one of these rehearsals.

The women willed the book’s copyright to to Dame Joan Evans, an art historian who believed Julian’s theory. She refused to authorize any more English editions of An Adeventure.

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This story has fascinated me ever since I first read it as a kid. Then, as now, it seems to be that the women actually walked back in time.

David Wilson at Crossroad Press recently emailed us his latest story bundle. This is a term used for ebooks that are bundled together and sold for an incredibly low price. Murder of Mysteries is a compilation of 20 novels, including several of ours, for $2.99. In order to get exposure, we put it o our Facebook pages, tweeted it, and so on. I also asked my friend Hilary Hemingway and her husband, Jeff Lindsay, if they would put the flyer on their Facebook pages. Now, here’s the synchro:

Jeff wrote the Dexter novels. Dexter is a blood spatter expert who works for the Miami Dade police department. He’s also a serial killer. For anyone who hasn’t seen the TV show or read the books, Dexter’s full name is Dexter Morgan. He has a sister named Deborah Morgan. If you look at the list of authors on the flyer, you’ll see the name Deborah Morgan. Rob and I got a good chuckle over that. I emailed Hilary about it and she replied: Wonder how often she is asked about her bro?

Name synchros. You gotta love them.