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Ariel School drawings

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The morning of September 16, 1994 probably started like any other morning at the Ariel School, a private elementary school in Ruwa, a rural farming community in Zimbabawe. But by mid-morning, when the kids broke for recess, the lives of 62 children and their teachers would be forever changed.

During the recess, most of the teachers were inside the building at a meeting and the kids, ranging in age from five to twelve, were outside. The only adult supervisor at recess was the mother of one of the children, who  operated a snack bar that sold soft drinks and snacks.

At around 10:15, some of the children saw three silver balls in the sky over the school.  These balls suddenly vanished in a flash of light, then reappeared elsewhere in the sky. This pattern was repeated three times before one of the UFOs began to move down toward the school. The craft either hovered just above the ground or landed in an area about three hundred feet from the recess field. The ground here was densely wooded with trees, thorn bushes, and shoots of bamboo. The only path through the area had been carved by tractors when they tried to clear the land.

A “small man” about three feet tall appeared on top of the UFO, then walked a ways across the rough ground. According to the children interviewed by Cynthia Hind, a South African UFO researcher, the man wore a tight-fitting, shiny black suit, had long black hair, and a “scrawny” neck.  His face was pale, his eyes immense. When the man became aware of the children, he allegedly disappeared. He or someone similar to him reappeared at the back of the UFO, which then took off.

Some of the children ran in terror toward the woman who was operating the snack bar, telling her what they had seen, but she didn’t believe them.

Hind arrived at the school the next day. She had already asked the headmaster to have the children make drawings of what they had seen so she reviewed the sketches and then began interviewing the children.

In Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters, John E Mack, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, wrote about his involvement in the investigation of the Ariel School sightings.  He and his research associate, Dominique Callimanopulos, had already scheduled a trip to Zimbabwe that was unrelated to the Ariel sightings. That’s something of a synchro right there.We couldn’t find the reason for this scheduled visit, but it seems that Mack was in the right place at the right time.

So when the BBC bureau chief faxed Mack and his associate  the drawings the children had done at Hind’s request,  Mack decided to investigate and he and Dominique arrived at the school in early December and stayed for two days.

Mack’s background in child psychiatry was apparently a powerful asset. He met with twelve of the children, interviewed the headmaster,  and met with most of the teachers. Each child they interviewed told a similar story, “that at 10:15 on that Friday morning, a large spacecraft and several smaller ones, from which one of more ‘strange beings’ had emerged, were seen hovering just above the ground or had ‘landed’ in their schoolyard.” At one point, Mack played devil’s advocate  with one of the kids and suggested the possibility that she had made up the story and gotten the other kids to tell the teachers this story as a prank.  Her reply was that she could understand how an adult might think that, but “that’s not what happened.”

Mack died in 2004. But in 2007, Dominique Callimanopulos and filmmaker Randall Nickerson began production of a non-commercial, edited video program presenting John Mack’s interviews with the schoolchildren and faculty. A year later, Randall Nickerson left for Africa to cull additional information about the Ariel sightings. He stayed for nine months and interviewed many of the now-adult witnesses.  Click here for his findings.

The Ariel School sightings remain one of the most compelling mass sightings even now, nearly twenty years later.

Recently I received an e-mail from a woman who used to be a girlfriend of one of my long-time friends. She asked if I remembered her and updated her life. Back in the mid-90s when Trish and I would see her occasionally with my friend, she worked as a lawyer for a government agency. Fran recalled that we had taken a trip to Key West with them when Megan was young.

Apparently, that trip was in 1995 because I signed a copy of Prophecy Rock for her and put in the date. Soon after Fran received a promotion that required her to move from Fort Lauderdale to Atlanta. My friend, who’s also named Rob, tried to keep things going in a long-distance relationship. But it was never the same and eventually they broke it off.

Now she wrote that she was married, living in Washington, D.C. and had a nine-year-old daughter. She also mentioned that synchronicities were an important part of her life. I wrote back and asked if she was working as a lawyer. Her answer was interesting.

“Yes, I am working as a lawyer in D.C. and about to be furloughed!  The synchronicity is that you signed your Prophecy Rock novel for me dated 12/22/95 and wrote, ‘Happy Furlough.'”

That was back when Newt Gingrich controlled the House of Representatives and shut down the government. Fran temporarily lost her job then, as now in the current ‘Sequester.’ What goes around, comes around.

Nika and Noah on the dog dune

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We’ll be posting links to our most recent radio interviews on the right side of the blog, beneath the cover for Aliens, and at this link in the pages.

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Polo season will continue for another few weeks here, until Easter, and that means a lot of dogs that come to the park are strangers to us. But even the strangers exhibit the same attributes as the regular dogs – a focus on the immediate, the now, this instant.

The now is different for every dog, just as it is for every human. Some dogs just want to sniff around and explore on their own. Others are here to run, play, and commune with other dogs. Some are focused on a specific task – catching the ball, the Frisbee, or that pesky poodle’s tail. Some prowl the fence, hoping to spot a squirrel. Then there are the dogs who bound into the park and greet everyone, human and canine alike, the social butterflies. We have an occasional aggressive dog with anger or dominance issues, but considering how many dogs visit the park, they are surprisingly few. With each dog, though, there’s an immediacy to what they’re experiencing and for the most part, that immediacy strikes me as joyful.

So I find myself marveling at the possibility that most dogs live naturally in a state of joy, bliss, happiness. Are they, in their focus on the moment, teaching us, their humans, something? We humans come to the park with our issues and concerns, our stuff about partners, kids, jobs, and sit around in sun or shade, depending on the season, then talk about what’s wrong instead of about what’s right.  We gripe and complain, advise and tell stories.

If we are energy that vibrates at a particular frequency and that frequency attracts corresponding experiences and people, situations and opportunities, then we should probably pay attention to our dogs – and to all the animals, domestic and wild,  with whom we share our lives. They live more fully in the moment than most of us do.

For the most part, dogs don’t seem to fret about the future and or dwell consciously in the past. They don’t hold grudges. They apparently forgive and forget. Even abused animals can overcome the memories with the right owner, the right alchemy of love and companionship.

And so here we are, with a treatise about the dog park and life and our ability to create our reality from the inside out by being fully present in our own lives. And not once did I mention human politics!

I’m watching less news these days. I walk around outside every morning, appreciating the beauty of my backyard. I make a daily list about what I’m going to do – and what I hope/expect the universe to do. Maybe it’s all silly. But suppose it isn’t? Suppose this is how it works at the quantum level, each thought and desire connecting with Indra’s Net?   Suppose this is how tipping points in ideas, products, and belief systems are achieved? Suppose, just suppose, this is how our collective reality is woven together? What we, as individuals, do and think, feel and act upon is important. It takes just one of us to change the world.

Our animal buddies seem to know this. Do we?

From time to time we’ve written about synchroncities that have occurred in our gym. For example, one day Bruce Gernon, who co-authored THE FOG with me, mentioned he saw Bruce Springsteen in the gym – he’s a member and frequents the gym in winter when he’s living here – and then , as if on cue, a Springsteen song comes on the satellite radio station.

Now recently, I’ve gotten entangled in a series of synchronicities related to the Mitchell-Hedges crystal skull and Indiana Jones. Here’s how it unraveled.

A young guy at the gym, who Trish pointed out on a couple of occasions as being a good match for our daughter Megan, came up to me one morning, introduced himself, and mentioned he knew I’d written several Indiana Jones novels. Then he asked if I had anything to do with the last Indy movie, I.J. and the Kingdom of Skulls.

I told him my first novel was called Crystal Skull, published a year before I started working with LucasFilm, but it wasn’t related to the movie.  Tom said he was asking because there was someone I should meet, the father of a friend. The reason I should get in touch with him was because Bill Homann is the current owner of the famed Mitchell-Hedges skull.

At the time, I was getting Crystal Skull republished as an e-book. So I wrote Bill Homann on Facebook, mentioned Tom, and asked if he had any photos I could use for the cover of the e-book. But I never heard back. Weeks passed and Tom pestered me about calling him every time he saw me at the gym. Finally, one day I called and left a message. Then, minutes later, checking my cell phone, I noticed that Bill had called me the previous week. We finally got in touch. He sent me a dozen unusual photos the skull – including the one above – and he invited us to see the skull in Sedona, where he lives.

Bill also mentioned that he has stopped showing the skull publicly because of threats from certain individuals to confiscate the skull. I didn’t know what he was talking about and wondered if he was being a bit paranoid. But I would soon find out otherwise.

That happened on March 13 when the Huffington Post ran a strange story  about an archaeologist in Belize who was suing Lucas Film and Disney over the use of crystal skulls in the movie. Dr. Jaime Awe also claimed that the Mitchell-Hedges skull belongs to the people of Belize and was stolen from a ruin. He wants it returned. The law suit is bizarre since the acrylic skulls in the movie looked nothing like the Mitchell-Hedges skull. But there it was, Indiana Jones tied in with the Mitchell Hedges skull. Fiction and real life entangled.

It’s rare when synchronicity can be seen in a photograph. But there it is in the above photo –   a young Bill Clinton shaking hands with President Kennedy. Young Bill already had his eyes on the White House and the White House photographer captured synchronicity.

It was July 1963 when 16 year old Bill Clinton traveled to Washington D.C as part of a Boys Nation retreat. One of the events involved attending a White House ceremony with the president. Before leaving, Bill promised his mother that he would come home with a picture with the President. Upon arrival, Bill worked his way to the front row of seats in the Rose Garden.

When Kennedy finished speaking, Bill leaped to his feet and reached out to shake President Kennedy’s hand. Then, as if fated by history, the White House photographer was ready and captured the handshake between the president and future president. As he arrived home clutching his picture for his mother she would later comment to others, “I knew right then that politics was the answer for him.”

It was a picture that would change Clinton’s life and tie him directly to Kennedy. Kennedy would be assassinated only a couple months after the picture was taken and high school senior Clinton suddenly became one of the few in the Hot Springs, Arkansas area to ever have met Kennedy. The teenage Clinton became a sought after speaker in all the Kiwanis, Rotary, and other clubs in town talking about Kennedy and politics.

After Clinton moved into the White House as the new president, he gave orders to his friend Webster Hubbell to get the facts related to two great mysteries – the Kennedy assassination and UFOs.

“If I put you over there in justice I want to you to find the answer to two questions for me: One, who killed JFK. And two, are there UFOs.”  — Friends in High Places by Webster Hubbell,   former deputy attorney general

Think about this era for a moment. Men and women dressed like the cast in Grease, Afro-Americans still couldn’t vote, and in most states, the only way you could divorce your spouse was to prove he or she was guilty of a crime.  The Cold War was in full swing, and Harry S Truman, the unpopular incumbent president, had decided not to run in the November election. Eisenhower won that election and ended twenty years of  Democratic rule.

But in July 1952, Truman was still president and, according to CIA historian Gerald Haines, his administration was alarmed about a “massive buildup of (UFO) sightings over the United States.”

The sightings in Washington, D.C. began on July 19, at 11:40 p.m., when seven to ten UFOs were tracked on radar at Andrews Air Force Base and Washington National Airport. They  were about fifteen miles south-southwest of the city, no known aircraft were in the area, and they didn’t follow any established flight path. The UFOs reportedly moved along at normal speeds of 100-130 mph, then accelerated to speeds estimated to be over 7,000 mph. They were observed for more than six hours.

The objects were seen by pilots, air-traffic controllers, civil engineers,  and ordinary citizens. Around three that morning, shortly before jet fighters arrived from Newcastle Air Force Base in Delaware,  the UFOs vanished simultaneously from all radar screens.  But when the jets ran low on fuel and had to return to base, the objects reappeared, which convinced a senior air traffic controller, Harry Barnes, that the UFOs were monitoring radio frequencies.

Over the next ten days, the UFOs reappeared  and F-94 military jets were dispatched to intercept them. But the jets were never able to get close enough to shoot. According to Lt. Colonel Moncel Monte, an Air Force public information officer, they sometimes outflew the pilots by “as much as a thousand miles an hour.”

The media, of course, had a field day, with headlines screaming about flying saucers in restricted airspace over the White House and the Capital. The headlines of the Washington Post on July 28 read: ‘Saucer’ Outran Jet, Pilot Reveals. From The New Yorker: ‘Saucers’ Spotted on Capital Radar. The Washington Daily News headline for July 29: Jets Ordered to Hunt Down Flying Saucers.           

On July 29, Major General John Samford apparently realized the Air Force had to make some sort of official response, so he held a press conference. It was the largest and longest pres conference the Air Force had held since the second world war.  The following day, July 30, the Washington Times Herald ran a cartoon featuring flying saucers, with a caption that read: Are these what you saucer?  Beneath it was: Mirage, Says AF Officer of ‘Saucers.’  The officer, of course, was James Samford, who told the press corps that he was satisfied in his own mind that the appearances of the objects were the result of atmospheric conditions.

The article went on to explain that radar experts from the Air Force Technical Intelligence Center at Wright Patterson AF Base said that false radar images often are created “by a type of air layer that ‘bends’ the electrical beams.”  Temperature inversions as an explanation was readily accepted by debunkers, but Air Force Captain Edward Ruppelt wasn’t convinced. Even though temperature inversions occurred nearly every night in June, July, and August, none were strong enough to effect radar.

So, way back in 1952, sightings by dozens of ordinary citizens and technical experts were relegated to the land of “weather.” And anyone who thought otherwise instantly became an outlier, to be shunned and ridiculed. It’s an effective weapon. And it has worked for decades.

–                                                              Rupert Sheldrake

You’ve probably heard of TED, a global set of conferences with remarkable people giving talks on a variety of subjects. TED is about ideas, or as they say, “ideas worth spreading.” The name stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design. I’ve never attended a TED conference, but have been impressed by videos of talks.

So it was surprising and disappointing to find out that one of my heroes from the world of science, biologist Rupert Sheldrake, has been censored by TED. Sheldrake recognizes that we are more than physical beings and that mainstream science needs to let go of outdated mechanistic view of the universe. He researches the paranormal – specifically telepathy – and his theory of morphic resonance was so controversial when he first introduced it that one science magazine called him brilliant and another – NATURE – called him a “heretic.” NATURE actually said his paper should be burned. But the bottom line is that he’s a scientist with vision, a man whose work is on the fringe, but supported by experimental evidence.

After he gave a talk at a TEDx conference, skeptics of the paranormal attacked Sheldrake for challenging what he sees as dogma in mainstream science. They demanded that  TED take down his video and the TED administrators complied.

Here’s what our Australian friend futurist Marcus Anthony says about the matter.

“Unfortunately, TED took down Rupert Sheldrake’s TED talk about ‘science set free.’ Two skeptics complained about the talk, which posited 10 questions which challenge scientific orthodoxy on a number of key questions, including the nature of consciousness.

“Sheldrake merely asked the ten questions, and suggested they be scientifically investigated. This is indeed a rather disturbing development, given that the discussion page on the issue indicated that the general public was heavily on Sheldrake’s side. If one cannot legitimately ask open questions about the way science is conducted, or about discrepancies in data, then science is no longer open inquiry, but a set of unquestionable dogmas.

“Tellingly, this was the central point in Sheldrake’s talk that has been removed. They also removed a talk by Graham Hancock, who openly supported Sheldrake.”

It’s disappointing to see TED caving in to pressure from skeptics. It seems to show that mainstream science has become a ‘religion,’ a dogma, the very type of mindset that science is supposed to shun.