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 A dining room table isn’t just a piece of furniture; it’s also associated with memories.

The year that Megan was born, Rob and I bought a new dining room table at some cool furniture store in Fort Lauderdale. The table was teak, with beautiful tile inlays. For the next twenty years, that table hosted mostly holiday dinners, some of them large, most of them small. And the rest of the time, we ate at the kitchen table.

Twenty years after we bought the table, it collapsed, almost as though it sensed it hadn’t been loved or used enough  to count. For the last four years, that space has sat vacant in our house. Rob has used it for yoga and meditation classes,  the cats sometimes wandered around in it, apparently wondering what had happened to the table.  

Then a friend told us she had a table she’d bought from her sister that was too large for her kitchen and were we interested?   The table was made of dark wood, had six chairs,  and she was selling it for $150 and her boyfriend could bring it over to our place.

So one afternoon between thunderstorms, the dining room table was delivered. The dark wood that we weren’t sure we liked at first kind of grew on us. Rob and I ate a couple of dinners at the table. It felt good. But it wasn’t truly initiated until this evening, when Megan had a going away party for her friend, Ross Berlin. They met in high school, went to the same college, and now Ross is moving out of state.

We’ve known Ross since he was 15 years old, a verbal, opinionated kid who could talk to you about mythology and politics as though he were a 40-year-old in disguise.  We think of him as Megan’s spiritual brother, the son we didn’t have. When Megan  did her internship at Dolphins Plus in Key Largo, she lived with Ross’s mother. When Ross was sick with some terrible virus, he bunked in our back bedroom and we fed him chicken noodle soup and antibiotics. It has been that kind of friendship.

Now Ross is headed to Oakland, California with his girlfriend, Megan, a dancer of Somalian descent, and will be building houses with Habitat for Humanity while Megan is obtaining her master’s degree from Berkeley in dance. The other couple at the dinner were Leandra, who is training to become a yoga instructor, and her boyfriend Steve, a fixture in Wellington polo who writes for the magazine his family owns – Polo Players.

 The other guest was Ashley, also a high school buddy of Megan’s and Ross’s,  who is now married to an Egyptian Muslim. She just went through her first Ramadan with no liquid or food ingested  between dawn and dusk – and got ill after the first day and said, That’s it. I can’t do this. “Me, neither,” her husband said, and that was that for them.  

At some point in all this discourse, I realized our new dining room table was being initiated in a way I hadn’t expected but welcomed completely. Our daughter had made salmon burgers for her friends, a going away party for Ross, and now our table  suddenly possessed its first memory.

Twenty years from now, Rob and I will be in our eighties, and everyone at this table  tonight will be in their forties. Tempus fugit, as my mother used to say. And as time flies, we build our memories, one moment at a time.

Sometimes I’ll read about or see a you tube account of a UFO sighting that strikes me as bogus. The following account does NOT have that same vibe. In reading through this story on the examiner, I’m impressed with the details, the length of time that passed, and how the witness  saw a whole Star Wars like scenario play out. Here’s the link for the report. The above photo is not one of the pics the man sent to the examiner. I didn’t find his photos that impressive. Then again, his pics were, I believe, taken with a cell phone.

This interview for Aliens in the Backyard is the first we’ve done through Skype that was also videotaped. That means you can’t be wearing your pajamas, you can’t look at your notes, you can’t be sipping from your bottle of water. Oddly, Rob has a triangle (light reflection) of light against his forehead. Ah, those trickster aliens!

If you’re a politician who lies, cheats, steals, starts wars without just cause, caters to the very bankers who caused the recession in 2007-2008, much can be forgiven. But in the U.S., if you’re involved in a sex scandal, your best bet is to resign and hope that you can make a comeback somewhere up the road. For Congressman Anthony Weiner, the dark trickster may make such a comeback difficult, if not impossible.

Weiner served as a Congressman of New York’s ninth congressional district from January 1999 to June of 2011. His politics were progressive, he appeared frequently on progressive cable shows to talk against Gitmo – the American off-shore prison for terrorists  – and George W. Bush, about the financial meltdown, the mortgage crisis, all of the talking points that are near and dear to the hearts of progressives. Then in 2011, the photo of a man’s “bulging, underwear-clad groin” (Wikipedia’s description) appeared on Weiner’s Twitter account.

From the onset, he denied that he’d posted it and said  his Twitter account had been hacked. But when more photos emerged showing Weiner bare-chested in his congressional office, he came clean. Yes, he had sexted with several women, but insisted he’d never met any of them, had never had sex with any of them. On June 23, 2011, Weiner resigned.

 Here are the synchros:

 Ø  His name:  Wee-ner.

 Ø  One of the women ‘involved’ with Weiner was deemed by her high school newspaper as “Most Likely to Be Involved in a Tabloid Scandal. At the time of the Weiner scandal, she was a 21-year-old college student in Washington state.

 Ø  Weiner’s wife at the time – and now – Huma Abedin, is a longtime aide to Hilary Clinton, whose husband was involved in a sex scandal with Monica Lewinsky.

 Ø  Weiner was “roasted” by late night shows and social media that included a familiar song from a popular advertisement that dated back to 1965, when Weiner was just a year old:

 I wish I were an Oscar Mayer Weiner
That is what I truly wish to be
cause if I were an Oscar Mayer Weiner
everyone would be in love
oh everyone would be in love
everyone would be in love with me

 On May 21, 2013, through a You Tube video, Weiner announced that he would run for mayor of New York City in 2013.

On July 22, 2013, Weiner held a hasty press conference that is probably going to tank his political career. He admitted to sexting a 22-year-old woman, sending her sexually explicit photos of himself, and basically doing the same thing he’d done two years earlier, when his wife was pregnant with their son. When Weiner talked to this woman, his handle was Charles Danger.

 Honestly, can you hand late night comedians anything better than this?

Weiner’s press conference, with his wife at his side, struck me as a peculiar American schizophrenia when it comes to sex and politicians. He didn’t apologize – always a big no-no for Americans, and actually sounded irritated that he’d had to give a press conference to talk about any of this. His wife made a gracious – although uncomfortable speech – and talked about how she’d forgiven him.

Now go back a few years to Mark Sanford, who  was governor of South Carolina from 2002 to January 2011. But for a week in June 2009, his whereabouts were unknown to the public, his wife, and to the State Enforcement Division, which provided security for him. He was missing in action and  it became a nationwide news item. Before his disappearance, Sanford told his staff he would be hiking the Appalachian Trail.

Upon his return, that was his story, until a reporter intercepted him at Atlanta’s airport where he had arrived on a flight from Argentina. Within a few hours, Sanford held a news conference and admitted that he’d been unfaithful to his wife, that he’d spent a week in Argentina with his soul mate.

His admission ultimately led to censure. But he completed his term as governor , has since become engaged to his mistress, and recently won a congressional seat for South Carolina. Apparently, he was forgiven.

But it’s unlikely that Weiner will be forgiven. As one MSNBC commentator put it, Sanford can be forgiven because he is now engaged to his soul mate, the woman who was his mistress. True love prevails. Never mind that it broke up his marriage and nearly ruined his career. True love is true love, right?

The Weiner sexting scandal, on the other hand, was creepy and sleazy when it first happened two years ago and is even more so now. At the same time last summer that People Magazine did a very domestic happiness spread on Weiner and his wife and their newborn, he was sexting the 22-year-old woman,  who has since  given a tearful interview in which she apologized to Weiner’s wife.

What I find particularly sad about all of this is that when Weiner was in Congress, he voted for liberal agendas and pushed that agenda on cable new shows. He was well-spoken, passionate, had a sense of humor. Now? In his latest press conference, you could feel his underlying panic and sense the indignation of his massive ego: WTF, why should I have to be bothered about any of this?

The really curious thing is that it’s not as if Weiner’s wife is Gadzilla – she’s physically lovely. And she’s no mental midget – she’s one of Hilary Clinton’s aides. Granted, we don’t know anything about the emotional dynamics between the two, but based on what we do know, Anthony Weiner may qualify as a sexual predator.

If I were a Manhattan voter, would I want a guy like this as mayor? Nope. Too many distractions, too much  me me me,  and with so much scandal swirling around him, would the business of New Yorkers ever be addressed?

Then there are  the creepy, sleazy elements…

The world’s oldest calendar has been found in a field in Scotland, and could date back to 8,000 BC.

Researchers at the University of St Andrews were part of the team which analysed the Mesolithic monument originally excavated in Aberdeenshire by the National Trust for Scotland in 2004.

Their research is now published in the journal Internet Archaeology and sheds new light on the luni-solar device.

The team, led by Birmingham University, believes the “calendar” was created by hunter-gatherer societies and pre-dates the first formal time-measuring devices known to humanity, found in the Near East, by nearly 5,000 years.

The capacity to measure time is among the most important of human achievements and the issue of when time was ‘created’ by humankind is critical in understanding how society has developed.

Until now the first formal calendars appear to have been created in Mesopotamia around 5000 years ago. But during this project the researchers discovered that a monument created in Aberdeenshire nearly 10,000 years ago appears to mimic the phases of the Moon in order to track lunar months over the course of a year.

The site, at Warren Field, Crathes, also aligns on the Midwinter Sunrise, providing an annual astronomic correction in order to maintain the link between the passage of time, indicated by the moon, the asynchronous solar year and the associated seasons.

Dr Richard Bates, Senior Lecturer in the School of Geography and Geosciences at the University of St Andrews, said: “St Andrews has an established reputation for remote sensing studies of early prehistoric sites in Scotland but the site at Warren Field is unique.

(By remote sensing, Bates means aerial photography, not remote viewing by psychics. To read about remote viewing of the ancient past, here’s an Army/CIA declassified report of work by Joe McMoneagle. The target is out of this world.)

“It provides exciting new evidence for the earlier Mesolithic in Scotland, demonstrating the sophistication of these early societies and revealing that 10,000 years ago hunter-gatherers constructed monuments that helped them track time.

“This is the earliest example of such a structure and there is no known comparable site in Britain or Europe for several thousands of years after the monument at Warren Field was constructed.”

Project leader Vince Gaffney, Professor of Landscape Archaeology at the University of Birmingham, added: ‘The evidence suggests that hunter-gatherer societies in Scotland had both the need and sophistication to track time across the years, to correct for seasonal drift of the lunar year and that this occurred nearly 5,000 years before the first formal calendars known in the Near East.

“In doing so, this illustrates one important step towards the formal construction of time and therefore history itself.”

The Warren Field site was first discovered as unusual crop marks spotted from the air by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS).

Dave Cowley, Aerial Survey projects manager at RCAHMS, said: “We have been taking photographs of the Scottish landscape for nearly 40 years, recording thousands of archaeological sites that would never have been detected from the ground.

“Warren Field stands out as something special, however. It is remarkable to think that our aerial survey may have helped to find the place where time itself was invented.”

Professor Clive Ruggles, Emeritus Professor of Archaeoastronomy at the University of Leicester, who advised the team, said: “The site did not mark particular moonrises as the changing patterns of moonrise are far too complex – the argument is that it represents a combination of several different cycles which can be used to track time symbolically and practically.

“There are certainly hunter-gatherer societies who use the phase cycles of the moon to help synchronise different seasonal activities but it is remarkable that this could have been monumentalised at such an early period.”

From 2004-6 the National Trust for Scotland excavated the Warren Field pit alignment, which lies on its Crathes Castle Estate, in collaboration with Murray Archaeological Services. The Trust’s Archaeologist for Eastern Scotland, Dr Shannon Fraser, said: “This is a remarkable monument, which is so far unique in Britain. Our excavations revealed a fascinating glimpse into the cultural lives of people some 10,000 years ago – and now this latest discovery further enriches our understanding of their relationship with time and the heavens”.

Dr Christopher Gaffney, of the University of Bradford, added: “For pre-historic hunter-gatherer communities, knowing what food resources were available at different times of the year was crucial to survival.

“These communities relied on hunting migrating animals and the consequences of missing these events were potential starvation. They needed to carefully note the seasons to be prepared for when that food resource passed through, so from this perspective, our interpretation of this site as a seasonal calendar makes sense.”

* Time and a Place: A luni-solar ‘time reckoner’ from 8th millennium BC Scotland
Internet Archaeology, 15 July 2013 (https://dx.doi.org/10.11141/ia.34.1)

Statcounter is a free statistic counter that provides enormous amounts of information about who visits your site or blog. Among these bits of info are:  how long a visitor stays, the computer operation system, the ISP address, the physical location, the search term used and on which search engine,  the  ISP address, physical location, the date and length of the visit. I suspect that at some point in the future, Statcounter may be declared illegal because it provides so much information about your visitors.

Last year, after we began posting the stories about Charles Fontaine’s UFO encounters, we were shocked to discover visits from nearly every federal agency. These visits ranged from the FBI to the NSA to the Department of Defense, to the Navy Information Network (NINC), the FAA. Visits from the The IRS and the Social Security Administration were real puzzlers. The Canadian Royal Mounted Police spent a full eight hours on the blog, sifting through all nine posts and the comments.

In the last few days, we’ve had hits from the DOD, NINC – and, today, the Department of Homeland Security. This agency, which sort of sounds like Nazi Germany, was created by Bush in the wake of 9-11. By 2011, it employed nearly 250,000 employees and had a budget of nearly $100 billion.

Whoever this was at DHS used Google and entered the search term alien hybrid program,  which is, as of this writing, still listed as number 3 on Google. We posted this story on March 3, about a month after Aliens in the Backyard was published.

So my questions are twofold: are these spy agency hits from some bored employees who may have an interest in UFOs? Or is there a deliberate and focused effort to gather as much information as possible on UFOs, ETs etc. And if so, why? For a country that continually denies the existence of aliens, that debunks sightings and just about everything else associated with UFOs, why bother?

As John Mack, Harvard psychiatrist, abductee researcher and author noted: “For our own government and other governments around the world the abduction phenomenon presents a special problem. It is, after all, the business of government to protect its people, and for officials to acknowledge that strange beings from radar-defying craft can, in seeming defiance of laws of gravity and space/time itself, invade our homes and abduct our people creates particular problems.”

After the revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden about the extent of the government’s spying program, I am wondering if any of Snowden’s yet to be released documents deal with UFOs.  Will we ever know? Right now, Snowden is stuck in Moscow airport’s transit zone, unable to travel to any of the Central and South American countries that have offered asylum because those flights would have to traverse U.S. airspace. He has applied for temporary asylum in Russia – which has told him he can stay if he stops releasing his “damaging information.”

Granted, governments need to be able to protect their citizens. But does this mean the U.S. must continue to be the world’s cop? To engage in endless wars, to meddle in and manipulate the affairs of other countries? Does it mean drone surveillance of its own citizens? A security camera at every intersection? Does it mean we’ll never be told the truth about anything? Doesn’t Homeland Security have better things to do than skulk around blogs and websites that mention aliens  and abductions?

Well, maybe not. If these government guys  construe that aliens are a true threat to national security, then it makes sense they would scour blogs and websites for information. We assume the government knows more than we do about what’s going on with UFOs etc, but suppose they are basically clueless? Suppose they are relying on us – the people who write about, explore, and experience contact – to help them understand what’s actually going in?  Suppose they believe that we have pieces of the puzzle they need?

That sort of changes the discourse, doesn’t it?

So I’ve got a question and an invitation for you guys at the official levels: how about dropping by and leaving a comment? If you’ve got questions, ask. Someone somewhere will  probably be able and willing to answer it. We’re a friendly, inquisitive group; engage us.

                                                                Gypsy Woman

+++

It seems when we’re focused on a matter–whatever it might be, and putting energy into it, the chances increase that related things will pop into our awareness. That’s synchronicity, of course. In an earlier blog post, Trish mentioned how Dean Radin’s book, ‘SuperNormal,’ had arrived long after her birthday–for when I’d ordered it–but right at the appropriate time. She was working on a chapter on psychokinesis in our new book and looking for more material.

Now I’ve got a somewhat similar tale that involves our work on the same book. I was working on a chapter dealing with UFOs and the paranormal, and I’d been focused on a particular story dealing with an encounter that a writer acquaintance of ours had experienced. In the back of my mind, though, I was wondering where I would come up with more stories as the chapter needed to be expanded. Trish, meanwhile, was gathering stories from the blog for a chapter she was working on, and called out to me that she’d come across a good story about UFOs and synchronicity – one that Jenean Gilstrap – or Gypsy Woman – had provided and we’d put it up on the blog. “Send it to me,” I said, and so she did.

Essentially, Gypsy’s story revolved around a trip she was taking from Louisiana to Delaware. As she left on the journey, she put out a request to the universe to see something, anything unusual. What followed were two days of driving that included three apparent UFO sightings that are described here.

Since our book is entitled The Synchronicity Highway, Jenean’s story fit right into the theme, as well as my UFO chapter. After working it into the chapter, I stood up to take a break and picked up my iPad. It was open to a game called Mystery Manor that has sucked up some of my spare time – one of these addictive Internet diversions. The back of my hand apparently hit an icon on the game that popped up and to my surprise it showed a portrait of one of the characters in the game. Her name was labeled in large type and stood out. Guess what it was–Gypsy Woman!

Like I said at the top, when we are focused on a matter, other related things pop into our awareness. Since the game was right at hand, it was an easier option for the Universe than for the real Gypsy Woman to pop up! Though, you never know, that could happen, too!

As if that wasn’t enough, as I came on the blog to write this post, the first thing I saw was a comment from  you guessed it – Gypsy – responding to a post Trish had written in part about lab experiments to prove psychic phenomena. Right at the end, Gypsy commented: “Oh, and Rob is right. Life is the lab.”

The Artist’s Way, published in 1992, proposed a rather unusual idea at that time – that there’s a link between creativity and a spiritual connection to a higher source. If you look in the index, though, there’s only a single mention of synchronicity, which I found odd even when I first read the book.

Creativity is usually defined by four words that begin with “i:” imagination, inventiveness, inspiration, ingenuity.  Synchronicity is rarely mentioned. And yet, creativity and synchronicity are like twins conjoined at the hip. They share organs, skin, blood, the life force. They complement and nurture each other. In fact, without meaningful coincidence, our creative endeavors often fall flat. We’re able to take an idea, a concept, just so far and can’t make that final leap into something larger than ourselves that speaks to the human collective. And I now wonder if that quantum leap is the spiritual missing link.

 In an interview, author and philosopher Ken Wilber, said: “Synchronicity has been an important part of my own spiritual path ever since I can remember. It is something that I’ve come to relate to as a sort of ‘experiential faith,’ an actual tested faith that has shaped the architecture of my own life story in dramatic ways. My experiences with synchronicity have been varied, seeming to come and go in waves, often accompanying times of great creativity, inspiration, and transformation. Sometimes they are flirtatious, like hearing an unlikely word just as I am typing it on my screen.”

 The Dalai Lama went ever farther: “I am open to the guidance of synchronicity, and do not let expectations hinder my path.”

In terms of spirituality, synchronicity seems to address the ways in which each of us is linked to something larger than ourselves, to Indra’s net, to Jung’s collective unconscious, and yes, perhaps to some higher source. Regardless of the term we use for this higher source – God, Buddha, All That Is, Source Energy,  Mohammed, Christ – the bottom line is that we can connect to it through synchronicity.

I mean, let’s face it. We’re born. We die. Those are the facts. In between, we explore, we delve, we experience, and we feel everything in the spectrum from despair to joy, from paralyzing fear to liberating certainty that we are more than our physical bodies, as Robert Monroe was fond of saying. 

But the bottom line is that regardless of what traditional religions tell us about heaven and hell and the afterlife and all the depressingly weird worlds between (limbo?!)  we really don’t know.  Maybe in our three-dimensional existence, we can’t know. Maybe we can’t quite stretch ourselves that far. And yet, some of us do. Some of us trust our own experiences to the point where we become the outlier, the outcast, the weirdo down the block who sees ghosts or talks to the dead or looks for signs at every twist in the path.  

But my sense is that outliers are growing exponentially every second of every day and that, perhaps sooner than we can imagine, there will be so many of us that a tipping point will  be reached and a new, more evolved paradigm will be born.

This afternoon, a book arrived from Amazon – Dean Radin’s Supernormal: Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Abilities.   Rob had ordered the book for my birthday back in June, only to realize it hadn’t been published yet. But it arrived at exactly the right moment.

I’ve been working on a chapter in our new book on psychokinesis and needed some new sources. It turns out that Radin’s book has two chapters on psychokinesis – Psychokinesis in Living Systems and Psychokinesis in Inanimate Systems.

By a living system, Radin is talking about people. This chapter covers phenomena like levitation – particularly among yogis and physical mediums;  consciousness field effect- whether Transcendental Meditation (TM) Sidhi practitioners meditating on peace and nonviolence actually lowers  crime and  violence; intentional influence at a distance; and the love study.  By inanimate systems, Radin is talking about humans interacting with and affecting machines and objects and veers into the movement of objects through nothing more than the power of the mind, the teleportation of objects, random number generators, the hemi-synch experiment (associated with the Monroe Institute).

There’s a lot of great information in these two chapters, but the main drawback comes from what Radin says early on in the book – that anecdotal evidence doesn’t constitute scientific evidence. The only evidence that matters in science is what can be proven in a laboratory. Rob’s response to that?  “Life is the laboratory.”

Many of us have experienced telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, and some of us have even experienced psychokinesis – mind-matter interaction.

When testing psychokinesis with inanimate objects, two types of experiments are conducted – micro-PK, where the targets are microscopic (photons, radioactive particles) and macro-PK, where the target is large enough to see with the naked eye.  Spoon-bending is considered a macro-PK. “This phenomenon has  been studied a few times under quasi-controlled circumstances, and in my opinion it seems that something interesting may be going on,” Radin writes.   However, Radin says, since there are many ways  of bending metal with conjuring techniques, the scientific evidence is insufficient. 

 “That said,” he continues,  “if I were forced to decide whether it was possible to bend metal for real, without using blunt force or conjuring methods, then I would say yes, it is possible.” And he says this because not only has he seen it done by ordinary  people, but he himself did it at a spoon-bending party.  He apparently attended this party to observe a woman who claimed to have previously bent the bowl of a soup spoon. He was holding a large, heavy soup spoon and was mimicking this woman’s hand movements so he could get a sense of what she might be doing.

 While watching  the woman, he heard someone shout, “Look what you’ve done!”

 Radin glanced up to see what the commotion was about and it turned out that he was the source of the commotion. “I had somehow bent the bowl of the spoon I was holding about 90 degrees. I immediately checked my fingers to see if I had unconsciously used force, because it would have taken an enormous effort to create that bend and the effect would have left clear indentations on my fingers. There were no signs of force.”

 Someone shouted at him to bend it all the way, so he pinched it with a thumb and forefinger. “After the bowl folded over, it stiffened, and within a few seconds it became as hard as steel.”

 Radin hasn’t been able to repeat what he did. “So I can’t explain how this happened, nor do I present it as evidence for macro-PK. But it did happen.”

 And this is where I have an issue with “scientific evidence.” Radin, a scientist himself, bent a spoon.  But he states he doesn’t present this as evidence for macro-PK. Why not? Why should his personal experience, his personal “evidence,” take a backseat to some lab experiment? “The bottom line about macro –PK is that the jury is still out, We don’t have enough data under sufficiently strict controls to gain much confidence about mind-matter interactions large enough to be seen with the naked eye.”

Toward the end of the book are four or five pages on UFOs and encounters where I felt more hopeful for science generally. A little background.

 In 1957, Carl Jung published Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky and made a convincing  case for UFOs as the unfolding of a modern myth. As Barbara Hannah explained in her biographical memoir, Jung: His Life and Work, Jung wasn’t interested in whether UFOs were real. The fact that people all over the world were seeing round objects in the sky was what intrigued him. “Roundness is the symbol par excellence for the Self, the totality,” Hannah wrote. In other words, these round saucers were symbolic of a merging collective need for wholeness.

In the nearly 60 years since Jung wrote his book on UFOs, crafts of numerous shapes and sizes have been reported, physical evidence has been left behind, and thousands of abductees have come forward with their stories. How is that a myth?

But as Dean Radin pointed out in Supernormal: Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities, “Jung’s use of the term ‘myth’ does not imply that UFO sightings or for that matter encounters with angels, aliens, fairies, spirits, elves or demons are just fantasies. Rather, it suggests that some of these experiences may literally be psychophysical, a blurring of conventional boundaries between objective and subjective realities.”  Or, “mind literally shapes matter, that the imaginal and the real are not as separate as they seem.”

In 2005, I co-authored THE FOG, a book about the Bermuda Triangle with Bruce Gernon. We told Bruce’s story in Aliens in the Backyard, and now as we’re writing the sequel The Synchronicity Highway, I recalled a story Bruce told me that we didn’t use in Aliens. I couldn’t remember all the details, but quickly jotted down the story as best I could, then send Bruce an e-mail with a copy of it and asked him to clarify anything I got wrong.

So here’s what I had written.

On another occasion, Gernon went boating on the ocean with a group of friends near sunset. As the boarded the party boat, Gernon told the owner of the boat that they would see a UFO that evening. The man laughed, thinking that Gernon was joking. But after dark, a bright light appeared in the distance, hovered, then shot off and disappeared. The boat owner told everyone that Gernon had predicted the UFO. “I didn’t believe him and I didn’t believe in UFOs. But thanks to Bruce, I’ve seen the light!”

Bruce called me a few minutes later and reminded me that actually we’d used the story in THE FOG. I’d recalled the gist of it, but left out a lot of details. The UFO had beamed a light down to the ocean, which moved in a slow circle several times as the craft descended lower and lower toward the ocean, then simply disappeared into the sea.

When Bruce called, he was somewhat baffled that I’d written him about this story. In fact, it was fresh in his mind because he had just had lunch with Timothy Bogle, the boat captain, that night, a couple of days earlier and they’d talked about it.

Hey, synchronicity and maybe telepathy as well. Bruce hadn’t seen Bogle for years and I hadn’t talked to Bruce for a few months. Yet it all came together.

The reason he’d gotten together with Bogle was that a History Channel program was considering doing yet another show that would feature his Bermuda Triangle experience and they were looking for a new angle. They wanted to interview the first people he talked to about what happened to him in his now infamous flight from Andros Island to West Palm Beach.

Considering the incident occurred in December 1970, many of those people–including Manson Valentine, then director of the Miami Museum of Science and an avid researcher of mysteries of the unknown–are now dead. But Bogle was still among the living and Bruce remembered telling him about his strange experience the same day he predicted that they would see a UFO when they went out for the planned party at sea.

Bruce told him the production company would also probably ask about the UFO they saw. But 40 years has passed and Bogle, who was a skeptic before he ‘saw the light,’ had slipped back into skeptical mode. He told Bruce it was probably an airplane and besides he was high at the time. Bruce reminded him that the craft had made no sound and they’d remarked that the engine sound of airplanes travels over water for miles. But Bogle just shook his head. He couldn’t go on television and say that he’d seen a UFO.

He no longer saw the light. Too bad. But Bruce sees the light now more than ever. For years, he tried to explain the Bermuda Triangle as an unknown weather condition he refers to as electronic fog. But now in retrospect he’s convinced that the B.T. phenomenon is directly related to UFOs and that the enormous cloud that chased him and surrounded his plane, then literally teleported him 100 miles in an instant, was harboring a UFO. After all, in the aftermath, he had no less than 20 UFO sightings, including one close encounter, and on several occasions he predicted they would appear. Something definitely happened to Bruce that day.

I told him years ago that I felt a UFO was at the heart of his experience, and  he finally agrees.