Welcome to The Mystical Underground

In 7 Secrets of Synchronicity, we wrote about an empath and friend, Renie Wiley, who sometimes worked with police on various cases, using her empathic abilities to provide information that the police couldn’t obtain any other way.  One night in later 1984, we accompanied Renie to a police station to observe her working on a missing child case, which we also wrote about in the book. But there were parts of the story that we didn’t include in the book because the section was on empaths and synchros and not on spirit contact. So here’s the full story:

On May 24, 1984, eight-year-old Christy Luna had walked to a store near her home in Green Acres, Florida, to buy some cat food and never returned. The police suspected foul play and Renie confirmed as much when she used Christy’s stuffed toys to tune in on the girl. In the book, we describe this in some detail. As an empath, she felt what Christy felt when her mother’s boyfriend used to beat up on her and reported the girl was deaf in one ear because of the beatings. Christy’s mother later confirmed this fact.

Later that night, we left the station with Renie and one of the police officers and drove around, following Renie’s directions until we arrived at a wooded area surrounded by a high barbed wire fence. Renie felt that Christy’s body was buried somewhere in the woods and that the mother’s boyfriend had killed her.

Skip ahead twenty-four years, to 2008. Los Angeles psychic Dennie Gooding called to tell us she would be visiting South Florida in March,  that she would be working on a missing person case and was there any chance we could all get together? It turned out she would be in town over the same weekend that other friends involved in the MU (mystical underground) would be visiting from around the country, so everyone agreed to meet at our place.

The day before the festivities, we were going through some old books, weeding out what we no longer needed. A check fell out of one of the books. It was dated 1986, made out to us for $50, repayment on a loan, and was signed Renie Wiley. We exclaimed about how strange it was, that the check had been inside the book all these years, and we wondered if Renie was trying to contact us and we just hadn’t been aware of it. In all the years since she had passed away, we’d never experienced any contact with her.

The night of the festivities (as we gathered with psychics, mediums, a past life therapist, a writer for the Simpsons), Dennie told us she’d been hired by  a police officer at the Palm Beach County sheriff’s department who worked in the cold cases division. When she began describing the case, Trish suddenly interrupted her.

“Is this the Christy Luna case?”

Dennie’s eyes widened with shock. “Yes.”

“You’re not going to believe this,” Rob said, and walked over to the drawer where we’d put Renie’s check, and brought it out. “Here’s how we know.”

It was as if Renie had reached out from the afterlife through the unsolved disappearance of Christy Luna and the psychic who had been hired to delve into it nearly a quarter of a century later. The synchronicities were remarkably layered and the contact occurred in an unusual way. Here are the facts:

Renie and Dennie didn’t know each other. Renie had long since passed away by the time we met Dennie through a Canadian astrologer who touted her psychic ability and gave us her contact information. If Trish hadn’t left a comment on his blog about his post on Mercury’s retrograde during the 2000 presidential election, they probably wouldn’t have communicated at all and we never would have met Dennie.

Rob had a reading with Dennie around 2002 or so. We gave her name to another friend, Nancy, who recommended Dennie to the wife of the police officer who eventually hired her to delve into the Christy Luna case.

Neither of us remember sticking Renie’s check inside a book. In fact, in 1986,  we were just starting out as writers, money was tight, and it’s likely we would have cashed the check as soon as we’d gotten it.

The cluster in this instance revolved around the unsolved disappearance of Christy Luna and the two psychics who, separated by nearly twenty-five years, worked on the case.

At any point in the past, different decisions might have been made and none of the events described here would have happened. So who was orchestrating all this, anyway? And that’s always the bottom line, isn’t it?

Thanks to Adelita for posting this on her blog! How cool would it be to actually be able to do this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB3EwcDH8Ak

On Thursday evening before I went to bed, I noticed on a news site that there was a tropical wave somewhere off the coast of Mexico. This year, the Pacific has had a lot of waves, storms, and typhoons, so it didn’t strike me as unusual. But when I got up this morning and looked at the news, I was stunned.

The wave was now a category 5 hurricane with sustained winds of 200 mph and a central barometric pressure that surpassed anything I’d ever seen – 880 millibars. Hurricane Andrew in 1992 had a central pressure of 892. Hurricane Katrina’s lowest central pressure was 920 at landfall. Hurricane Wilma’s central pressure at her peak was 881 millibars. The barometric pressure of a hurricane is really the key to everything.

In about 30 hours, this wave had exploded into the most powerful hurricane ever recorded on the planet. Its barometric pressure had dropped 100 millibars, faster than the 97-point drop of Wilma in 2005. So throughout the day, I monitored the various weather websites. Patricia was headed to the western coast of Mexico, somewhere between Puerto Vallarta and Manzanilla.

It made landfall at 6:15 pm central time, winds at 165 mph, about 55 miles south of Manzanilla. CNN’s Martin Savage is in Mexico and CNN will probably have a scoop on the aftermath.

As of tonight, a few videos are dribbling in from people in the affected area, but it’s difficult to tell anything about the damage because it’s dark. By sunrise, it will be a different story. One of the weather tweets I was following earlier in the day was by a guy with the weather channel, who had stopped by one of the shelters in the targeted area. There was no inner room, no inner sanctuary; the shelter was all windows! A hotel in Manzanilla reported that it had secured its windows with masking tape.

If this type of preparation was common in the affected area, then the destruction will be beyond belief.

Before the hurricane made landfall, Mexico’s climate negotiator pleaded with his colleagues at the UN for some sort of global pact about taming greenhouse gasses – i.e., climate change.

This evening, Rob and I were talking about the hurricane and agreed that if a storm with winds of 200 mph was headed toward South Florida, we would flee. We would close up our storm shutters, secure the house, then pack up our pets and some books and our computers and get out of here. The problem in Mexico is that the government had about thirty hours to order evacuations.

In South Florida, just for the counties of Palm Beach, Broward, Miami/Dade and the Keys, it would take 3 days to evacuate everyone. And that figure is from 2005, our last bad hurricane season. Now, with the increase in population and tourism, it would probably take twice that. During this kind of panicked evacuation, it’s doubtful that we would  make it beyond Orlando, less than three hours north of us in central Florida. But it’s at least more than a hundred feet above sea level, far better than the east coast of Florida!

The latest stats on Hurricane Patricia tonight just after midnight came from the Weather Channel.  The storm is now a cat 4, with winds of 130 mph, but when it made landfall with winds of 165 mph, some gusts were up to 211 mph.

Ever since a hurricane figured into one of my novels in 1994 and then again in 2004/2005, I’ve been fascinated by these storms. There is something about them that suggests sentience, a kind of organized intelligence that you recognize when you see an eye as perfectly formed as Patricia’s.

In the larger scheme of things, what kind of creatures are these hurricanes? Yes, Patricia is evidence of climate change, but what’s the deeper message for us as a collective, a species? What’s this tell us about the future of this planet? That ubiquitous eye stares back at us from space, where this photo was taken, and seems to say, Hey, folks, guess what? I’m your wake-up call and where would you like to go from here?

There’s an odd postscript to this. When I woke up this morning my first thought was that it was Michael Crichton’s birthday. In retrospect, it seems that Hurricane Patricia is the kind of story he might have written.

A home in the mountains somewhere is looking very good right now!

Yesterday, Hilary Clinton spent 11 hours testifying before the Benghsazi committee of twelve – 7 Republicans and 5 Democrats – about what happened at Benghazi. This investigation has lasted for 17 months and, depending on who’s talking, has cost between $4.5 million to $20 million. Congress has held 21 hearings on the Benghazi attacks, in which four Americans were killed; it held 22 hearings concerning the events of 9/11, where 3,000 people died.

George Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, John Yoo – remember those names? Not a single person in the Bush administration has ever been called before a Congressional committee and questioned about torture at Gitmo or about why we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2004, Bush and Cheney testified for just three hours during a private session to the 9/11 commission.

If you watched any of this hearing, you undoubtedly noticed the chairman of this committee- Trey Gowdy, a former prosecutor and Republican Congressman from South Carolina.

Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, holds the panel’s first public hearing to investigate the 2012 attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, where a violent mob killed four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2014. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

This guy is creepy, the paragon of the Republican tactic to make Clinton look bad and to undermine her campaign for president. In fact, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy admitted as much on Fox News.

“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought,” McCarthy said.

As the Washington Post noted, “McCarthy’s statement gave Democrats what they have long sought: a rather strong public hint that this investigation was never on the level. ‘This stunning concession from Rep. McCarthy reveals the truth that Republicans never dared admit in public,’ said Congressman Elijah Cummings (D- Maryland), the committee’s ranking Democrat. ‘The core Republican goal in establishing the Benghazi committee was always to damage Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and never to conduct an evenhanded search for the facts.’”

And that ploy was certainly evident during the hours of the hearing that Rob and I watched this evening. Bernie Sanders is my choice for president, but honestly, after watching Clinton during these hearings, I was blown away by her endurance, her crisp answers, her certainty, her utter cool. The Republican members of this committee, particularly Gowdy, kept trying to trick her, asked the same questions in different ways, hoping to grab a Gotcha! moment. But he and the other Republican members of the committee – in particular Lynn Westmoreland from Georgia, and Martha Roby from Alabama – came across as foolish inquisitors cut from the mold of the Salem witch trials.

At one point, Roby’s line of questioning collapsed into absurdity. She was trying to depict Clinton as a cold, heartless bitch who didn’t give a damn about her employees or about the people who were killed in Benghazi. She asked Clinton about the night of the attack, when Clinton left her office and went to her home in Northwest Washington:

ROBY: Who else was at your home? Were you alone?

CLINTON: I was alone, yes.

ROBY: The whole night?

CLINTON: Well, yes, the whole night. [Laughter]

ROBY: I don’t know why that’s funny. Did you have any in-person briefings? I don’t find it funny at all.

CLINTON: I’m sorry, a little note of levity at 7:15 [p.m.]. Noted for the record.

This entire hearing backfired on the Republicans. I think they handed Clinton eleven hours of uninterrupted publicity – and the presidency.

As Rob remarked later, “Can you imagine Trump sitting there for eleven hours? He would’ve gotten angry and started criticizing the committee members’ looks, and then walked out.”

I dislike the sense of entitlement that Clinton brings to this campaign. Two Bushes were more than enough for me, thanks. But the ideas of two Clintons is sweetened by the fact that she’s female. And yet, Hilary voted for the Iraq war and is much more hawkish than I like. And she’s a Scorpio – the most secretive sign in the zodiac – and, like Bush, has a cluster of planets in the 12th house, the most private and secretive house in the zodiac. That said, after seeing her in this hearing, listening to her measured, intelligent responses to even the most ridiculous questions, her composure never cracking, I was impressed.

If she turns out to be the Democratic candidate, I will vote for her – not because she’s my favorite, but because she’s resilient and the alternative – Trump? Ben Carson? Marco Rubio? –  would be grounds for moving to another country.

This campaign is like something from The Hunger Games. As they said at the beginning of that movie, Let the games begin!

Hooray! Katy Walker has  finished her feature-length film on synchronicity, and appropriately it will debut in theaters in L.A.,  N.Y., Austin, and Amsterdam on 11-11. Here’s a summary along with a trailer. We  just watched a private viewing and Katy asked if we would review it.

Considering that Katy is an Internet friend and we were guests on her radio podcast show and we conversed about scenes in the film while it was being made, it’s difficult for me or Trish to provide an unbiased review. Combine that with the fact that I am writing now in the aftermath of one of my meditation-yoga classes in which I tell my students to look at the world with an open heart, to be non-judgmental, and remain as much as possible in present-moment awareness. That’s mindfulness, which naturally douses the flames of the critic within. And, of course, it’s not a very appropriate point of view for reviewing a creative endeavor.

Nonetheless, here goes. I enjoyed this movie and plan to watch it again. I place it up there with What the Bleep in New Age/spiritual/higher awareness documentaries. Well, that’s kind of gushy, right? But true. However, I first had to get past the title, which is somewhat vague since I can eat up a lot of time and not get any art accomplished. In a note to reviewers, Katy explains the underlying premise of the film this way: “Perhaps we can tap into a way of being that is not ruled by a finite sense of time, but rather by the ability to live in harmony with the true creative nature of our existence.”

Okay, that reservation aside, clearly, from the very first moments, this is a movie about synchronicity and personal evolution as seen through the vision of art and the artist.

The documentary follows the journey of a writer, compelled to make sense of the mysterious and powerful energy she felt at her aunt’s deathbed. Considering herself a skeptic, a series of strange coincidences leads her on an exploration of synchronicity – the concept that all beings are mystically interconnected. Along the way, she meets fellow seekers like Allyson Grey & Alex Grey, Toko-Pa Turner, Richard Tarnas, Graham Hancock, Daniel Pinchbeck and biologist, Rupert Sheldrake, who guide the writer on her journey.

My favorite interview was the mind-blowing one with artist Alex Grey, who analyzes his tree of life painting from 1988 that foretold of the 9-11 disaster. He also provides other fascinating examples precognitive art and music related to 9-11.

Overall, Time is Art does for synchronicity what What the Bleep did for the law of attraction. The challenge for the movie’s success will be to see if people who don’t think in terms of synchronicity can navigate this path…or at least consider it as a possibility. Some viewers might get annoyed by the counter-cultural trappings that are so evident in the portrayal of art and the artist. If that’s an issue, practice listening and watching with an open heart and a non-judgment attitude. Just stay in the moment and see what happens.

This movie is worth the time, and you’ll enjoy all the art along the way. After all, Time is Art.

UPDATE: Katie informed us that the Alex Gray part of the film had to be removed at the request of Grey’s wife. This is really too bad.

Here’s a trailer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKW44OdIY70

Know what today is? It’s Back to the Future day – October 21, 2015, the day in the classic film that Marty McFly and Doc Brown traveled to in 1989’s “Back to the Future Part 2.” The film also supposedly predicted 911.

Here’s a link to the Washington Post article and of course, here’s the video made by the synchromystic folks. We first saw a bit about this on the news this evening then our blogging friend Darren from Australia alerted us to the article and you tube link. Thanks, Daz! It’s nice to see synchronicity gaining a larger audience.

me, Megan, my parents somewhere in the Southwest

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Today, my dad would have been 102. He was born in 1913, in an obscure town in Illinois, the son of immigrants from what was once Yugoslavia. He had two sisters and two brothers. The younger brother, Glen, died young, in WWII. Joe, the older brother, joined my dad in Venezuela in 1937, escaping the depression in Oklahoma, where they were living at the time.

He traveled to Venezuela on a seaplane, a trip that took thirty plus hours in those days. He landed in Lagunillas, a booming oil town on the shores of Lake Maracaibo, where he went to work for Creole, a subsidiary of Standard Oil/Exxon. He was a single guy, there were a lot of single women – mostly nurses – from the U.S. And for a while, he dated an American nurse.

When the war broke out, he returned to the U.S. and enlisted. On one of his breaks in 1945, he met my mother in Tulsa. She, too, was from a large family – the next to youngest among five siblings. Within six months, they were married and he ferreted her away to a continent which, in those days, was a wilderness of oil fields, a wild west to the Midwestern mindset.

My dad was an eccentric, a chess whiz, a math whiz, a member of Mensa, a loner whose universe was his family and his explorations of the unknown, the undiscovered. In time, he and my mother settled in Caracas, where I was born, and then later in Maracaibo, in an oil camp where my sister was born. When I was ten, we moved back to Caracas, where we lived until I was nearly 17. By then he was an accountant for Creole.

There’s much about my father that remains a mystery to me. He never went to college, his family couldn’t afford it, but he made sure that my sister and I were both educated through graduate school. He and my mother were both joggers, who pounded out their miles every week, six days a week without fail for years. As they got older and their knees began to hurt, they turned to swimming. All this physical exercise is probably why his heart rate and blood pressure were always low and why he was so rarely ill. He and my mother were health-conscious.

I recall that when he got bursitis in his elbow, he went to traditional doctors, who didn’t help, and finally wrote to nutritionist Adele Davis, whose bestselling book, Let’s Get Well had impressed him. Davis, for a modest $50 fee, recommended a certain nutritional program that included Brewer’s Yeast and within three days, his elbow had returned to normal and never bothered him again. That experience convinced him that traditional medicine wasn’t where the answers lay.

In 1963, as the political situation in Venezuela worsened, he took early retirement from Creole and we moved to the U.S., a major shock for me. We settled in Boca Raton, Florida – Rat’s Mouth is the literal translation. I hated life in the U.S. The cultural shock was so extreme that I started looking for answers about why I was where I was and what it meant in the bigger scheme of things. That’s when I discovered astrology.

I used to sit in my room at night, after I’d done my homework, calculating the complicated math for erecting charts – and then would take it to him to check my math. He didn’t have a clue about astrology but confided that his mother, a woman who had died before I was born, was an astrologer.

I also used to sit in that room and write and when I told him that was what I was going to be, what I was going to do, I never heard the usual line that unpublished writers hear: C’mon, no one makes a living as a writer. Instead, he said, Go for it. So I did. And when my first novel was published in 1985, he started a scrapbook. He used to check the royalty statements that Rob and I received – and found errors.

Because of him, Megan learned to play chess at a young age. By then she called him Buddy – the name he’d chosen for himself as a grandfather.

Somewhere in the mid-1990s, my mother developed Alzheimer’s and my dad struggled to care for her. Rob, Megan and I lived nearby and helped as often as we could. But by late 1999, my mother’s condition was so dire that we had to place her in an Alzheimer’s unit. My dad moved in with us, and Megan gave up her bedroom and lived in our living room. Not long afterward, we moved to our present home, where everyone had a bedroom. My mother passed shortly after we moved and every night for the next year Rob and my dad played chess in the evenings.

It’s difficult to have a parent living with you at this point in your life. But Buddy was so easy to live with, so unobtrusive, that our situation persisted to August 2001, when I walked into his room one morning and found him pulling a plastic bag over his head. I freaked. I completely lost it. Even though I understood his desire to die, I couldn’t imagine my daughter walking into his room and finding him a suicide. We later realized he had forgotten to take his Parkinson’s meds that day.

Not long afterward, we moved him to an assisted living facility in Georgia, where my sister was the head nurse. It felt like a good compromise. He was 90, Parkinson’s had robbed him of his ability to walk and care for himself, but my sister was a nurse who specialized in the elderly. Every few months for the next two years, I flew to Georgia to visit him.

On one of those trips, I took a CD that Carol Bowman had sent me, about a 20/20 piece that had been filmed on James Leiniger, a little kid who recalled a life as a WWII pilot, a case Carol has investigated, the best case for reincarnation in the western world. At the end of it, my dad turned to me, tears streaming down his sunken cheeks, and said, “That’s the best evidence I’ve ever seen for the continuation of the soul.” Up until he had watched that CD, he had been a skeptic that anything anything survived death.

Four months later, he released his tenacious hold on life and died. I’m convinced that the Leiniger case facilitated his death, that it convinced him he would not be annihilated, that it erased his fear of death.

So on this day, Buddy, on what would have been your 102^nd birthday, I want to  thank you for all that you brought to my life, for everything I learned from you. And most of all, I thank you for never discouraging me to follow my heart, my dreams, my soul. That is the ultimate tribute from a parent to a child.

I guess it could be considered a synchronicity when two emails arrive within a few days of each other that address the same question. Both writers had seen something unusual in the sky and pondered whether it was a UFO, an object from out of this world, or a secret experimental military craft. Interestingly, both emails came from people who have had previous dealings with UFOs.

The first story comes from Bruce Gernon, an experienced pilot and co-author (with Rob) of THE FOG, a non-fiction book about the Bermuda Triangle based on Bruce experiences and those of other pilots. Here’s what Bruce wrote:

“On August 25, 2015 I witnessed a UFO in the day time for the first time. I have seen many UFO’s over the past 59 years but they have always been at night time.

“My wife and I were driving back from the Florida Keys, but she didn’t see it because she was busy talking on her cell phone. It was around 6:00 pm and we were west of Miami, along the edge of the Everglades. The craft was about mile or two away from us and flying straight and level at about two or three thousand feet. It was heading in a northeasterly direction toward Miami International Airport, so I thought it was a commercial jetliner on the initial approach to land.

“There was an isolated thunderstorm just west of it that had just minutes before produced three large lighting bolts from within the storm. I noticed that the bolts were quite large considering the small size of the storm, which was only producing a light rain.

“When I first spotted the craft, it was bright silver. I thought it was an aircraft with a shinny sealed aluminum exterior that was reflecting the sun directly into my eyes. It looked to be the size of a jumbo jet.

“It cruised at about 200 knots for about ten seconds, then it made an abrupt maneuver, an upward sweeping turn toward the northwest. As it turned I noticed that it was shaped like a boomerang, much like the first flying saucers that Kenneth Arnold encountered in 1948. The shinny silver color seemed to fade to gray and it made an incredible high G upward turn and entered into the heart of the storm and disappeared.

“After witnessing this event I thought it might have been some form of lightning—like ball lightning, which I’ve seen several times, and even photographed it. It has always been inside a thunderstorm and it has always appeared spherical in shape. But this object looked more like a streamlined B2 bomber. If it wasn’t an unusual form of lightning, could it have been some secret advanced Air Force craft or a drone?

“I’d recently read  about Kenneth Arnold’s famous sighting, and saw illustrations of the crafts. Surprisingly, they looked like what I’d just seen. If they’re the same, then the UFO I saw – orones like it – have been visiting us for a long time.”

The other e-mail had arrived a few days earlier and was from Joe McMoneagle, who is well known for his participation in Project Stargate, the army and CIA’s psychic spying program that existed under various names from 1978 to 1995. Joe was known as Remote Viewer #001, the first to join, the longest to remain, and probably the best.

Rob was recently exchanging e-mails with Joe about a new book, Remote Viewing: UFOs and the Visitors, by Tunde Atunrase, that featured double-blind targets that were given to Joe. All Joe works with is a sealed envelope, containing the description of the target,with a series of numbers on the outside. He only sees are the numbers, the envelope remains sealed.

The book includes some famous cases, including the Travis Walton mystery and the Rendlesham Forest Incident. In the latter case – again not knowing what was inside the envelope or even who it was from – Joe described a ‘top secret unmanned remote controlled craft.’ In other words, a drone.

Subsequently, Rob asked Joe if he knew anything about a supposed secret military program related to UFOs called ‘Blue Avian.’ Here’s what he wrote:

“I’ve never heard of Blue Avian, by the way. However, it would be no surprise to me, since lately it’s my belief that the Air Force has been testing the follow-up to the Black Bird program for the past year or so. I once saw a craft moving at about 250 feet above ground and 3,000 MPH.”

I wondered if that was a typo and wrote back, “3,000 MPH?”

Joe responded: “The thing shook my truck like it was a toy. I caught an image of it from my left eye and then jerked my head to the right to see what it was. It was gone in two seconds over the mountains to my right which were fourteen miles away. All figured, it did around sixteen miles in three seconds with absolutely no sound at all. The butt end of it was glowing red, but it had no engines.”

“No sound, no engine. Are you sure it wasn’t a UFO?”

“I don’t know. Frankly, it could have been either. I know we’ve been able to defeat some of the sound problems with nape of the Earth flight, but at the speed it went by, I’d have to almost assume a separate or singular state of time/space separate from what we enjoy. Hmmmm. Just don’t know.”

Me neither. It seems like both exists…UFOs and secret military crafts, and the two could be connected.

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Months ago, I did one of my Barnes & Noble explorations, where I stroll through the aisles, searching for new books that looked interesting. Usually, I make note of the title and then check the price of the print book against that of an e-book. The latter usually wins. But not this time. I noticed a book called The Martian. Good cover. I picked it up, read the back copy, and even though I’d never heard of the author – Andy Weir – bought the book.

I loved it. I tuned it over to Rob when I finished it and he loved it. I passed it on to our daughter and she felt the same. By then, I knew it was going to be a movie, with Matt Damon as the Martian, and passed it on to others who enjoy good stories.   Today, Rob and I wet to see the movie version.

From IMDB: During a manned mission to Mars, Astronaut Mark Watney is presumed dead after a fierce storm and left behind by his crew. But Watney has survived and finds himself stranded and alone on the hostile planet. With only meager supplies, he must draw upon his ingenuity, wit and spirit to subsist and find a way to signal to Earth that he is alive.

 What this synopsis doesn’t tell you is that Watney is a biologist with a sense of humor who manages to grow potatoes on Mars that are supposed to keep him fed until he can be rescued by the very crew that deserted him because they thought he was dead. This synopsis doesn’t tell you about the human face of NASA, the engineers and math whizzes, the satellite communicators and computer nerds whose lives go on hold so they can bring this guy home.

Damon is spectacular in this movie. He emotes the loneliness, deprivation, and isolation of his situation without self-pity. He solves problems – the food, the oxygen, the water for the potatoes- and eventually, he even solves the communication problem and is able to chat with NASA, the astronauts who abandoned him. When an explosion decimates his potato crop, when he slams up against challenges that would send most of us to suicide, he shrieks, sobs, and we feel what he feels.

Oscar is written all over this movie. Gravity and Interstellar come to mind, but they can’t compete with The Martian. We’re rooting for this guy from the get go. Even though he’s an astronaut- the best, the brightest – he is also you and me. Matt Damon, last seen as a gasping secondary character in Interstellar, rocks as The Martian.

 May Oscar recognize you, Matt, as the actor who brought Andy Weir’s character to life.

Take a close look at this photo for a strange number synchronicity. If you think seeing repeated 11:11’s is a good sign, then what about 13:13? Maybe not so much. What we have here is pre-Halloween spooky.

At the top of the photo, you can see that the score of the Cleveland Browns – San Diego Chargers game on Sunday, Oct. 4 was 13-13. It was 3rd & 13 (3rd down, 13 yard to go.) It was the third quarter with 13:13 left to play. And at the instant the image was captured, there was 3 seconds left on the clock.

Maybe you say you saw all of that, but there are two more elements that are also present that are not so easy to pick out. Look to the upper right corner of the picture where the Cleveland Browns quarterback is standing on the sidelines. His jersey number is yes, 13. Here’s the final one that was missed by whoever put this up on the Huffington Post’s Sports Page. The date of the game was 10/04/2015. Add those numbers together and you get… ta da…13!

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If you’re interested in more spooky stuff, my book BUMP IN THE NIGHT: Ghosts, Spirits & Alien Encounters is now out in a trade paperback edition. You can find it here.