Welcome to The Mystical Underground

On February 12, President Obama gave his State of the Union address – which was great.  And Marco Rubio, a rising star in the Republican party, a senator from Florida, gave the Republican rebuttal, and it was a lie from start to finish.

The Republicans are struggling to rebrand and repackage themselves. Right now, it’s a party that cares only about the rich, that seeks to take women’s health back to the 1950s, that seeks to turn Medicare into a voucher system, to privatize Social Security, to redefine rape, to…well, you get the general idea. Rubio’s rebuttal, as one anchor put it, “was tinker-toys, a kid’s presentation of a philosophy at the 9^th grade level.”

First, Rubio said that Obama believed government was the answer to everything, that the free enterprise system was to blame for our economic woes, that higher taxes would solve our problems. He then went on to explain how he and his family had benefited from government programs – through education loans, Medicare for his parents,   and the lure of the American dream that anyone, anywhere, could achieve their full potential.

When I watched Rubio, my jaw dropped at the multitude of lies. He’s a member of the party that, under George W Bush, started two wars; created Homeland Security and the TSA, two huge government agencies whose number of employees is a government secret; under whose watch 9-11 happened; under whose watch we had the financial meltdown of 2008. Bush was a disaster for this country and for much of the world.  But Rubio seems to have forgotten all that. In Rubio’s world, Obamacare is the terrible  disaster that will bankrupt businesses, that robs people of the health care they now have, and just how are we going to pay for it all, anyway? Why should anyone be guaranteed health care?

Well, Marco, the Pentagon budget could pay for universal health care.

I’m not crazy about everything Obama does- I dislike the drone business,  that Gitmo is still open for business, and I don’t understand why we can’t end Afghanistan today rather than in 2014. I don’t understand why Obama hammers away about how great our military is and will continue to be. On the other hand, he  may be the most transformative and smartest president we’ve had in decades, with a unique background that effectively embraces a global humanity – and not just a community of  aging, rich white men.

Obama understands that as a country we can’t ignore the vulnerable, sick, and aging in our society. He understands that an affordable college education is intrinsic to our success and continued prosperity as a nation. He understands the need for a balance between government and private enterprise. He understands, as the Republicans do NOT, that equal rights must be extended to gays in society, in the military, across the board.

The synchro? Rob and I happened to have lunch today with Don, his off-road biking buddy, and Craig, Don’s brother-in-law. A spur of the moment thing.  I try not to have political discussions with people  I’ve just  met. I become obnoxious and intolerant of views that disenfranchise the many. Yet, Craig and I ended up having a civil and interesting conversation he initiated about politics, life, and all the rest of it.

He sounded reasonable on some issues – like unions. As a retired firefighter, he understands the importance of unions, which are supported by Democrats, not Republicans. He says he belongs to no political party, is disgusted with both parties, doesn’t understand why we are the world cop. OK, keep talking, Craig. Then he went through this long, convoluted thing about how he’s for equal rights for everyone but that he has a problem with the, well, legal marriage for gays.  I’m thinking, Huh?

“Really? It boils down to semantics for you?” I asked. “You think they should have all the rights as a heterosexual spouse in terms of property, death benefits, all of that, but that they shouldn’t be married?”

“Marriage,” Craig said, folding his hands together on the table, “is between one man and one woman. It’s in the Bible.”

At this point, I excused myself and said I needed to go next door to pick up a few groceries.

That’s how I felt during Rubio’s rebuttal, like I should excuse myself and find something else to do. The Republican Party, as it exists right now, is a dying paradigm. You can’t dismiss most of the electorate – women, Hispanics, gays, people of color, the poor and elderly, the vulnerable and disenfranchised – and win any election in this country. Even Rubio, whose parents are Cuban immigrants, who represents the rapidly expanding Hispanic electorate, can’t save this party, as it exists now, with a platform that benefits the few at the expense of the many.

A talisman is something which allegedly holds certain magical properties that protect us from harm, provide good luck, or communicate something we need to know. Or all of the above. I suppose we might call it a superstition. But when a particular pattern related to this talisman recurs again and again, we call it synchronicity: the coming together of inner and outer events in a way that is meaningful to the observer and that can’t be explained by cause and effect.

A talisman can be anything – an animal, a song, a book, a phrase, an object. My talisman is Frog. When a live frog appears in our home, it’s a signal that something big is coming. Whether the event is positive, negative or something in between seems to depend on the frog’s health, the room in which it’s found, and whether we can free it without hurting it.

For our friend Mike Perry of the UK,  white feathers are a talisman that usually indicate spirit communication and a positive affirmation that the soul lives on.  For our daughter, a dragonfly means communication and good luck. For other people, it might be the traditional rabbit’s foot, a ladybug, a shamrock. In fact, here are 50 good luck signs.

This evening, we received a neat story from David Wilson of Crossroad Press about his talisman. (Or is it talismen??)

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It was a normal day, nothing special going on.

I stopped to get my dry-cleaning, and as I got out of the car, I found a shiny, face-up 1983 penny right beside my car.  I’m not really superstitious, but sometimes…  anyway, I picked it up.

That same day:

I got an unexpected check for $900.

I got an e-mail from Clive Barker offering crazy-good help on a writing project.  He now is offering us some of his books.

I met the trustee of the estate of a dear, departed friend, Hugh Cave,  and became the publisher for all of that great man’s works.

I collect lucky pennies now and hand them out.  If I find one face down, I turn it.  If I have a penny, I place it face up where it can be found…

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…by you or me!

In the aftermath of our appearance on Coast to Coast AM, we received a number of fascinating emails – and a few phone calls. We’ll be posting about some of these stories periodically.

I’d like to preface this by saying that I’m always surprised when someone who is a complete stranger tracks down our phone number and calls. We have caller ID and usually don’t answer calls from numbers we don’t recognize. Our feeling is that if you have something to say that necessitates a call, then please leave a message and we’ll get back to you.

Not too long ago, a call from an unrecognized number came through and because the area code was from the city in Florida where our daughter, Megan, went to college, I answered it. I figured maybe she had lost her cell phone! But it wasn’t Megan calling.

The woman on the other end had written a book that involved synchronicity and wanted us to review it. Usually, we’re happy to help out other writers. But I was irritated by the call, by this woman’s pushiness, by her intrusion into that time of day when I enjoy my coffee and drop by other blogs. In the end, I sent her book to a friend to review and it got lost in the shuffle of daily life and was never reviewed.

One of the emails we received after Coast to Coast was from a guy named Tom, who has filmed a documentary called 933 skills that involves synchronicity/ETs, UFOs. Before you click on the link, please read  the rest of the post.

We received three emails from Tom within a 24-hour period, asking if we had watched his film. I explained that we were recovering from sleep deprivation – the show was from 2-5 AM EST – and no, we hadn’t watched it yet, but would.  So yesterday, I did.

There are three segments to this film, which add up to about half an hour. First, the numbers intrigued me – 933. A new one. What could it possibly address? I wondered, and clicked on part one- the clip to the far right on  the You Tube link.  I nearly stopped watching within the first minute or so because of the way Obama is depicted, but hey, okay, a difference of opinion and all that. I’m glad I kept watching.

Tom’s documentary involves a sighting on October 12, 1992, of a “a green ball of fire” that was witnessed by thousands of people in the northeastern U.S.  He delves into this event and the number 933 in the same way our Australian blogging friend, Daz, dives into synchronicities. Both men drill through layers of stuff, of connections within connections, labyrinths within labyrinths,  until your head spins. But the bottom line is always satisfying and provides insights into synchronicity.

I sent the You Tube link to mathaddict (Connie Cannon in Aliens in the Backyard). She’s the best numerologist I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing and  I figured she would have something to say about it. She did: Here I go again….the 933 on this guy’s moniker is 9+3+3 = 15 = 6. Any  questions, Bueller? This is the number, as we all know by now, of anything  relative to UFOs/ETs and such.

When I sent her remark to Tom, he asked, “Who’s Bueller?”

I think Bueller refers to a line in the 1986 movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off , a comedy starring Matthew Broderick. The important thing here, though, is that Connie identified, numerologically, the substance of Tom’s documentary.

After I watched part one, I was interested enough to click on part two. I happened to glance at the numbers of views it had received and yes, there it was, the number 933. Not 930 or 9,300 or 93. But 933, the very number Tom  talks about in the film. At this point, I asked myself what I usually do when confronted with this sort of thing, Who’s orchestrating this  stuff, anyway?

 There are no easy answers to that question. The WHO seems to depend on our individual belief systems – philosophical, spiritual, scientific, academic, medical, whatever. But for me, it usually goes back to physicist David Bohm. He believed in an underlying order in the universe that he called the implicate or enfolded order. It’s a kind of primal soup that births everything – even time.  The explicate order is our external reality – i.e. , for instance, Tom’s film. Synchronicity is what lives and breathes at the border between the implicate  and the explicate, the internal and the external realities.

The 933 views was an obvious synchro, a confirmation that I should watch parts 2 and 3. So I did. And Tom may be on to something here.

Each of us has a different way of experiencing, interpreting, using and  living with synchronicity. I couldn’t do a film like Tom’s; I can’t write about synchros in the way that Daz does. After a certain level of drilling, frustration sets in and I walk away. Yet I’m grateful for people like Tom and Daz who possess the patience and  perseverance to go for the absolute bottom line: what is this this thing called synchronicity, anyway? Who are we in the greater scheme of things?  And hey, hello, what’s going on? So take a look at Tom’s film. It provides much fodder for thought.

In 1995, Disney released a UFO documentary that coincided with the opening of a new ride, Alien Encounters, at Tomorrowland in Orlando’s Disney World. The ride, interestingly, was designed by George Lucas, an early link between Lucas and Disney World, a subtle hint of things to come when Disney bought out Lucas in 2012.

If you’ve never heard of Disney’s exploration of the UFO phenomenon, it’s not surprising. The 43-minute documentary was only shown once in five states and then shelved. Curious. It’s also bizarre to see Michael Eisener, then chief executive of Disney, almost matter-of-factly telling viewers that UFOs are real and aliens are here, and that the government was hiding the truth. Clearly, the documentary was created in coordination with the new ride, but the ride was promoted in the video as a means of preparing the world for the eventual revelation that they are here.

Apparently, Disney got tired of waiting for Disclosure. They closed the ride in 2003. Some said it was too scary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wKGyIbyo8iY

This link is about the ride being shut down.

Science is now telling us that we are divided into two kinds of people: supertasters and normal tasters. The super-sensitive tasters among us have more fungiform papillae on their tongues – bumps –  that hold our taste buds.  Supertasters can taste bitter substances  that normal testers can’t, and many tastes are much more intense for them.

The way that scientists discovered that humanity is divided into supertasters and normal tasters is a fascinating look at how science stumbles upon discoveries. This one happened at a DuPont chemical lab in Wilmington, Delaware in the 1930s: a bunch of chemicals exploded and one  scientist not only smelled the chemicals, but tasted them. The other scientist didn’t detect anything.

In November 1931, A.L. Fox, the chemist who made the discovery, presented a paper at the National Academy of Sciences:

“Some time ago the author had occasion to prepare a quantity of phenyl thio carbamide, and while placing it in a bottle the dust flew around in the air. Another occupant of the laboratory, Dr. C. R. Noller, complained of the bitter taste of the dust, but the author, who was much closer, observed no taste and so stated. He even tasted some of the crystals and assured Dr. Noller they were tasteless but Dr. Noller was equally certain it was the dust he tasted. He tried some of the crystals and found them extremely bitter. With these two diverse observations as a starting point, a large number of people were investigated and it was established that this peculiarity was not connected with age, race or sex. Men, women, elderly persons, children, negroes, Chinese, Germans and Italians were all shown to have in their ranks both tasters and non-tasters.”

According to an article in live science, about a quarter of the population qualifies as supertasters; they have many more bumps on their tongues. Another quarter of the population is so lacking in these bumps that they qualify as nontasters. Linda Bartoshuk, a physiological psychologist at the University of Florida, says, “Supertasters live in a ‘neon’ taste world, while others live in a ‘pastel’ world.”

For supertasters, bitter tastes are more bitter, but sweet tastes are also sweeter. “Supertasters are more sensitive to the burn from ethanol, the sweetness of sugar, the burn of chili peppers and the astringency of red wine,” said John E. Hayes, a professor of food science at Penn State.

These variances matter because they influence how and what we eat when we’re kids and help to determine our eating behaviors as adults. Researchers still don’t know which genes determine how many tastes buds we have but evolution may provide a possible explanation for the variance.

Bartoshuk speculates that when our nomadic ancestors entered a new environment, they had to find out which native plants were safe to eat.  And because plants often contain defensive toxins that taste bitter, the supertasters detected the bitterness and avoided those plants. “A supertaster is safer in a new environment, because they can pick up those bitters,” said Bartoshuk, “but a nontaster eats better in a safe environment, because they like more foods.”

Women are more likely to be supertasters than men – 35 percent of the population compared with 15 percent of men. Bartoshuk noted that the higher percentage of supertasters among women may be due to an instinctive protection of a fetus when a woman is pregnant.

I found this research fascinating. It takes one of our five senses and illustrates how that sense has evolved in an extraordinary way in some people so that it’s become  a kind of psychic sense. In ancient times, this sense would make it unlikely that you would die from eating a poisonous plant. Maybe in the 21^st century its purpose is the same: to detect certain chemicals or toxins in food that, if ingested, would harm us in irreparable ways.

In fact, now I may have a supertaster in my new novel, Fastwalkers. It takes place in a dystopian world where people with psychic ability are considered to be mutants and are rendered mute. The general populace is oppressed and contained by a certain kind of terror campaign run by Enforcers. I can see how the oppressed may decide to poison Enforcer foods. The synchro for me, I think, is that in my search for news about new discoveries in the quantum world, where it seems that synchronicity is born,  I stumbled upon an element I can use creatively.

I love it when this kind of stuff happens.

Recently, we posted a spirit communication story involving a red cardinal that was sent by Sharon Catley of Canada. Here’s another one of her stories, but this one involves a cat.

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I’ve had a lot of cats in my life and although they were all special in their own way there was one cat with whom I had a very special bond. I had always wanted a brown tabby and we got Henry (named after my paternal grandfather) when he was just a tiny kitten.

He was scared of everything and I spent a lot of time trying to comfort him and make him feel safe. Over the years we became great friends. I loved the feel of his fat little body and his fur. Henry loved to eat and got very fat. He also was not that good with his grooming and had his own smell – not unpleasant just different. I loved Henry so much I wrote a song about him.

Henry was about 10 years old when tragedy struck our household. Unbeknownst to us at the time, the dry cat food we were feeding our cats was laced with melamine. You may remember this from the news. Several of our cats became sick and the vet couldn’t figure out what was wrong with them. He thought maybe a virus.  We lost four cats in all but they did not die at the same time. Two others got very sick but survived.

I held out hope for Henry as he was younger than the others and, of course, robust. He took to staying under the bed and we had to put food and water there for him. At this time I was staying in the city during the week and coming home on weekends.

My husband and I always had a goodnight call at 10 pm then I would get ready for bed. This particular night (a Thursday) I had just settled down to sleep when all of a sudden I smelled the Henry smell and felt his presence. He just was there (not visually) sitting on my chest just in front of my face. I can still remember what his fur felt like. Then he was gone.

I got up and called John, asking if Henry was okay because I thought he had just come to see me to say goodbye.  John said he was still in the same shape but alive.

The next day when John came to pick me up and take me home for the weekend he gave me a big hug and said,  “Last night when you called back at 11 pm Henry had just died. I did not want to tell you because you were alone so I waited until today.”

We both held each other crying. I said, “He came to say good-bye.”

Since then other cats have passed on and before or since Henry no one else came to say good-bye – only him. God Bless you, fat little tab!

Our interview late, late last night on Coast to Coast is now posted on You Tube. Thank you, Charles Fontaine for the heads up!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufRuqbj9qDk

Today marks the official pub date for Aliens in the Backyard. We’re excited about this book for a number of reasons. While the topic of alien abductions has been around for a few decades now, we take an approach that is distinct and unique.

In essence, Aliens in the Backyard is our third book on synchronicity, following The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity and Synchronicity and the Other Side. We haven’t  seen any books that take a close look at the abundance of meaningful coincidences that often occur in the aftermath of UFO encounters or abductions. For Charles Fontaine, one of the four experiencers whom we focus on, such synchronicities were startling, mind-blowing. They also led him to us.

Beyond synchronicity,  we uncovered a specific type of psychic ability that many abductees and experiencers developed in the aftermath of their encounters. We call them ‘planetary empaths.’  They are so attuned to the planet that hours or days before a planetary disaster – earthquakes, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and even man-made disasters like 9-11- they experience a wide variety of physical symptoms and know that something big is coming.

We also explore the possible connections between an American naval base in the Bahamas known as AUTEC – Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center – and USOs – unidentified submerged objects – and the Bermuda Triangle. We have stories from people who worked at AUTEC about some of the incredible things they experienced. We’re also the only UFO investigators who actually talked to the commander of AUTEC about UFOs…and that was another synchronicity.

We started out the book  in a way that might surprise some readers in that the first chapter deals with a trip to an island in southern Chile to investigate a ghost ship, the Caleuche. The legend of the Caleuche, which many islanders believe are based on real experiences, is closely linked to the abduction phenomenon in that the mysterious ship is manned by a crew of brujos, or witches, who abduct islanders.

Besides Charles Fontaine’s dramatic story that take place in Quebec, we follow the story of pilot Bruce Gernon, who was pursued by a ‘cloud’ while flying through the Bermuda Triangle. We also write about Connie Canon’s experience with aliens on a military base, and Diane Fine’s story of losing a baby during an apparent abduction.

While many serious books about ufology avoid the topic of abductions and rarely mention synchronicity, we pursue both topics with a  sense of adventure. While the ‘old hippies’ of ufology might shrug and say, ‘Oh, another book about abductions…ho hum,’ we think we’ve written something unique. We think we have a winner!

Oh, another reason we’re psyched about Feb. 4 is that it’s the fourth anniversary of our blog!

Tonight we’ll be on Coast to Coast AM from 11 PM – 2AM pacific coast time. Here on the east coast, that translates to 2-5AM on the morning of February 5. Bring on the coffee!

Here are the links for Amazon Kindle and the trade paperback. Click here for an excerpt.