Welcome to The Mystical Underground

In early September 1984, my agent at the time, Diane Cleaver, submitted my manuscript, In Shadow, to Chris Cox, an editor at Ballantine Books. It was the 24^th submission for the novel (there were a lot more publishers back then!). The murder mystery is set in Miami, concerns a designer drug that enhances psychic ability, and features a black and white cop.

On the morning of September 17, my agent called to tell me that Chris had made an offer on the book. “He watched the premiere last night of Miami Vice, Trish, and was struck by the similarities between the show and your novel – Miami, the black and white cops,  the whole feel of it.”

Leap ahead. It’s late 1985. In Shadow has been published.  The first season of Miami Vice is such a big hit that Ballantine decides to do a book called The Making of Miami Vice. It’s to be  a behind the scenes look at everything that goes into the show – the terrific music, stunts, pyrotechnics,  editing, scripts, shooting, car chases, fashions, the stars, concept, the look. Rob and I got hired to write the book.  I was always struck by the synchronicity of our landing this project – that Chris had bought In Shadow the Monday after Vice premiered, the similarities in characters (my cops aren’t flashy!), the locale.

We were told we would have access the set, the stars, the nuts and bolts behind the scenes. We would be flown out to LA to interview Michael Mann, the sound and editing crew, Jan Hammer (the music guy) and anyone else who would talk to us. There was just one little catch: they needed the manuscript in two to three months, so it could be rushed into production in time to hit the shelves around the same time that season three premiered.

In early 1986,  we made our first of several trips to the set of Miami Vice. It didn’t take long for the two stars – Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas – to decide they didn’t have time to do interviews. It meant we have to patch together their chapters from other interviews, from our own observations on the set, and from their  co-workers. We initially were going to make their chapters the first two in the book,  but when we learned they couldn’t be bothered, we moved their chapters farther down. Johnson/Crockett became chapter 9 and Tubbs/Thomas became chapter 13.

This project was great fun. Everyone we talked to was gracious and accommodating. Eddie Olmos invited us to his house for coffee and we sat out on the porch talking about karma and life. John Diehl invited us to his small apartment on Miami Beach, where we met his cat- Panzy – and discovered that one of Diehl’s passion was boxing. He was a regular guy who had lucked into a fortunate role. He knew it. But he missed his girlfriend, an actress in L.A. and said he felt restless after two seasons of Vice. He was ready to try other parts.

Michael Mann (who went on to make movies after Vice) was fascinating. We talked to him in his office in LA, a cave of a room with black walls and a large poster of the galaxy. We learned that Mann is a risk-taker, a gambler, and doesn’t believe in playing it safe. “Film-making isn’t like dealing blackjack, where you know that sooner or later  the odds will come up in your favor. It’s like a big crap game. You have to take risks to win. I’d rather take a risk and fall flat on my face than play it safe and grow stale.”

One of the most interesting interviews we did was with Bonnie Timmerman, the brilliant casting director for Vice. Like Mann, she’s a risk-taker. She wanted intriguing secondary characters in each episode and during the first two seasons, some of those extras included: Bruce Willis, Bianca Jagger, Leonard Cohen, Lee Iococa (former CEO of Chrysler) James Russo, Jose Santana (father of musician Carlos Santana), Ted Nugent, John Heard.

Then there was the music… Jan Hammer’s fabulous pieces, but also everyone from Eric Clapton to Joe Cocker to the Who to Bob Marley.

The intricate details of putting together even a single episode of Vice were staggering. And when we finally sat down to start writing, it took us days to go through our notes and listen to the interviews we’d recorded. But the book came out that fall, right on schedule.

It went out of print  around 1989, when the series ended. And as the Internet developed and Amazon came into being, we watched used copies of Miami Vice go up for sale for as high as $350. At one point, I even wrote to one of these used booksellers and asked who was paying that much for a paperback book. “Collectors,” he replied.

At any rate, it’s now in digital format through Crossroad Press,  with formatting for every kind of reader and a really cool cover by Crossroad’s illustrator, David Dodd. That neon flamingo really captures the Art Deco scene of Miami Beach in the 1980s. And Crossroad’s price for the book is a bargain: $3.99. Here’s the first chapter.

Gypsy has had some unusual sightings over the years. We’ve posted stories about several of them. The following sighting occurred not long after her experience on a bus, which we wrote about here.

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Shortly after my bus/UFO incident, I moved to a rural area outside the city limits of Monroe, Louisiana. On this particular afternoon, my children were home from school and playing in the living room.

The living room had a large picture window with venetian blinds and drapes.  At some point I had asked one of the kids to close the blinds and draw the drapes across the big window. A bit later, I was in the kitchen [an open living space but from where I stood, the window wasn’t visible] and noticed that the room was lit up from the window. I asked again for the kids to close the blinds and draw the drapes and they said they had.

But there was this bright light – so bright that for a fleeting second I thought it must be the evening sunset. Then I remembered the window didn’t face west, so it couldn’t possibly be the setting sun. I walked over to the window and opened the drapes and blinds – and saw the source of this brilliant light.

Three circular objects hovered right under the treetops in the field behind the house. Each one was lit up and not with a row of lights kind of things. Each of these circular objects was brilliantly lit, they hovered at different heights, and were about the size of the body of a helicopter. If memory serves, they were varying shades of brilliant red-orange.

We all just stood there at the window, looking out at these tremendous, soundless, hovering balls of lights. We stood there probably a minute or so before they just swept upward and over the trees and disappeared. I have no idea what they were. Shortly after that, I moved and never saw the objects again, nor do I want to. This occurred sometime in the month of December.

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I asked Gypsy if these objects were giant orbs. She replied: “Yes, they were like huge orbs – imagine something about the size of a helicopter body.”

The hand mudra for namaste: the divine light in me recognizes the divine light in you.

Happy Thanksgiving to all our American friends. To our friends in other countries, we wish you were here to enjoy what is essentially a celebration of gratitude.

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In 2000, we moved into our present house. The backyard was a  disaster – barren of beauty, filled with weeds and fire ant hills. It definitely wasn’t a place where you would spend your free time. But that backyard also reflected the state of my life – and by default, Rob’s and Megan’s – at the time – my mother was in an Alzheimer’s unit and my father, who lived with us, had Parkinson’s.

Twelve years later, our backyard is a miniature jungle, a place where shadows pool beneath burgeoning branches and sunlight spills like liquid through leaves as large as condominiums. The biggest leaves grow from a vine that clings to one of our palm trees. Its tenacity is shocking. This vine started as a cutting from an ivy plant that didn’t look as though it would survive. I tossed it in the backyard shortly after we moved here, and it now it’s as tall as the tree.

We have three mango trees, and one of them is a Hatcher, the best of the best. When they are ripe, they weigh a pound or more and, inside, clumped round the giant seed, is a fruit so gold, so sweet and succulent, that when you sink your teeth into it, you enter Eden.  This type of mango was created by a Florida guy named Hatcher, who experimented with various types of mangos, crossbreeding, grafting, until he created the perfect mango. The Hatcher tree started from a tiny sprout that we bought about  week after we moved in.

Our avocado tree started from a seed about two weeks after my mother died. For years, it didn’t do anything, didn’t produce any avocados, it just kept getting taller and taller. Then my husband, Rob, trimmed the upper branches and suddenly, it began to bud and tiny avocados appeared. This year, it produced more than 50 avocados. We had so many that we gave them away at the gym, in yoga classes, to neighbors. And what we didn’t give away went into salads or into the blender for guacamole.

Then there’s the papaya. The enzymes of this fruit are fantastic for digestion. We started with a single tree in our garden and within a year it produced papaya that made your tummy sing. One of the hurricanes in 2004-2005 flooded the garden and because these trees have such shallow roots, the papaya tree was toppled. But we had tossed some seeds at random spots in the yard and some of the seeds took. We now have two papaya trees that produce fruit that are just fantastic.

At the back corner of our property is a grapefruit tree. It was a gift from my first editor, Chris Cox,  when our daughter, Megan, was born. It has been uprooted and moved twice in the last 23 years. It produces grapefruit that is best for juice.

Rob recently transformed the side yard, around the Hatcher mango tree, so that when I glance out my office windows, I see the tendrils of ivy that cover the ground and shoots of bamboo and lavender clusters of Mexican heather, a private little paradise. Critters scurry around, busy with their lives. Fire ants build great domes of sand, lizards and iguanas and possums feed from the bowl of cat food I leave out for a neighbor’s cat, squirrels feasts on our mangos, our avocados. Birds trill from the branches of the trees. I’m seduced into gratitude.

If we can’t appreciate where we are, how will we ever get to where we would like to be?

Everywhere I look outside in the yard, I see lushness, a richness that defies expectations. So when I begin to feel a nomadic itch for my favorite places – Ecuador, Costa Rica, the island of Chiloe in distant Chile, Angel Falls in Venezuela – I walk outside and my itch is briefly sated.

Nature speaks to us constantly – in small ways, big ways- and when we are attuned, when we surrender to the flow, we enter a sacred place where anything and everything is possible. My backyard is that kind of place.

Jimi Hendrix called it kiss the sky.

John Lennon called it Imagine.

Janis  Joplin called it A Little Piece of My Heart.

But for me, in some way, shape or form, it always reduces to synchronicity – meaningful coincidence. My outer world is the internal made manifest, a faithful reflection of my inner being. Maybe this sounds like New Age silliness, but for me, it happens to be true. When I step outside into my little slice of nature, my personal Eden, my Walden Lake, I am prompted to be mindful, present. I am here, now. But what’s that mean exactly?

It means that I must take my cues from everything in nature, not just the green lushness. Everything, even mice. We believe that one of our three cats caught a mouse and brought it into the house, where it escaped. We believe that mouse was pregnant.  Over a period of several months, we started hearing scratching in the walls. Our cats were unusually interested in an area under the stove. Our dog, a golden retriever, often joined the cats at the Watch Spot by the stove. We bought mouse traps, blocked off entrances and exits, and slowly and surely, the mice appeared. There were eight of them.

Eight mice. Living in our walls. Snacking on dog food, cat food, whatever they could find. Esoterically, mice are connected to details, eight is the number for money. We got the message and it was this: traditional publishing, in which we’ve been involved since 1983, is undergoing a tectonic shift. What worked in the past won’t suffice anymore. Our industry – like banks, insurance companies,   schools, every institution you’re familiar with – is changing. If we don’t change along with it, we might as well call it a day. So we’re branching out, trying new venues, following the synchronicities. I think it’s working.

This morning, I walked up the hall from the bedroom and saw a baby tree frog hopping toward me. These beautiful creatures have suckers on their feet and often cling to my window at night, when the insects gather on the glass.  Esoterically, they have always meant good luck and prosperity for us. I have no idea how this guy got into the house, but I open the front door and prod him outside, thanking him for dropping by, hoping he’ll enjoy the warmth of the morning sun.

I stand for a moment in the open doorway and am suddenly overwhelmed by the sight of the giant bamboo tree in our front yard.

It started as a tiny cutting I bought at Home Depot about eleven years ago. It was on sale. I nurtured it along for awhile as an indoor beauty,  then planted it in the front yard. It now consists of several dozen shoots that are probably twenty or thirty feet tall. The leaves shed constantly. Rob threatens to cut it back, but I think if we leave it alone, it will become a bamboo forest within several decades that will overtake this suburban neighborhood. And hey, maybe by then the bamboo forest will be populated with Pandas.

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This post was inspired by Isabel at Yareah Magazine.  On facebook, she mentioned she was looking for articles about nature and I said I would love to try an article.  Gypsy first told us about the because they published some of her fantastic poetry and she is now doing a column for them.

Earlier this year, we posted a dream recalled by Bruce Gernon, co-author of THE FOG, that involved a huge UFO appearing above an air show and putting on a display. The dream was about aliens making official contact.

Trish and I have both had UFO dreams, and one thing we’ve noticed about them is a feeling of excitement and wonder. We wake up feeling energized. Bruce felt the same way in his dream.

We’re wondering if many people are having UFO dreams, and if they are becoming more common. Dale Dassel, who resides in a small town outside of Macon, Georgia, recently mentioned a UFO dream in passing in an e-mail exchange.

“A couple weeks ago, I had a dream that I saw a UFO hovering motionless in the sky in broad daylight. Instead of  the usual disc or triangle, it was a ring-shaped craft with a reflective plate in the center, rather like a dark gray donut with a mirror blocking the hole, and many small dark windows dotting its circumference. I’ve never seen a UFO like that in any book or movie, but it was really unique and cool-looking. Of course, I probably wouldn’t say that if I saw it in real life; I’d probably be galvanized with terror and awe.”

When I mentioned to Dale that we were wondering how common UFO dreams are, he offered another one.

“A few years ago I had a recurring dream of a mass UFO landing at night, and the ground was covered with luminescent holograms (sort of like the Nazca lines) which projected into the sky to guide the ships down. The ships were of myriad shapes, impossibly gigantic, and literally thousands of them, almost like a colonization force.

“I remember feeling really exhilarated during the dream; being simultaneously excited and terrified. When I awoke, my pulse was racing and the imagery was vividly clear in my mind. Part of me wanted the scenario to be real, while the other part desperately hoped it would never happen. But I haven’t had that dream in quite awhile, so hopefully it wasn’t prescient.

Dale also sent the above Google image, which came up when he used the search term Atlantis. We would like to hear from others who have experienced UFO dreams. What was happening in these dreams? How did you feel as the dream was unfolding and when you woke up?

This is impressive. Thanks, Marcus, for alerting us to it.

We’ve seen a few documentaries about synchronicity over the years and our overall impression is that it’s a difficult subject to put on film. Is it possible to capture a synchronicity on film as if takes place? Maybe. But it’s nothing a producer or director could plan. That’s because the very act of doing so would be cause and effect, not synchronicity.

Yet, no doubt synchronicities happen in the process of putting together a documentary on synchronicity – or any subject, for that matter. I have yet to see one happen on film, but I can imagine how it might go.

Someone is being interviewed in an outdoor setting, the camera is rolling–the digitals are digiting–when someone not involved stumbles into the scene – a passerby who pauses to see what’s going on. It turns out that the person being interviewed is an old friend who has been out of contact for months, maybe years. Not only that, but the interviewee is telling a story about a strange incident from years ago that involves you and synchronicity. And , WOW, this is synchronicity happening right now.

That scenario reminds me a bit of the famous plum pudding synchronicity described by French writer Emile Deschamps in a biographer published in 1805.

With all that in mind, here’s a link to a teaser for a documentary on synchronicity that is currently a work in progress. The producer contacted us recently, said she enjoyed our synchro books and the blog, and wants to interview us for this documentary. Take a look

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK-5L5horRk

Some of you may remember that last winter we journeyed to Toronto where Trish was interviewed on William Shatner’s Weird or What about Wolfgang Pauli, or more specifically, the ‘Pauli Effect’–an ability Pauli apparently had to damage or shut down electronic equipment in laboratories simply by showing up.

To our knowledge, the program has only been shown in Canada so far, but we found it on You Tube by Googling ‘Weird or What Mind Control’ after a Canadian reader alerted us that she had seen the show.

We were surprised when we played it because we had no idea that the first third of the episode would be about alien abductions and mind control. That was a synchronicity for us, since we are writing, Aliens in the Backyard – Encounters, Abductions & Synchronicities.

The second segment dealt with the mysterious case of Pearl Curran, a poorly educated housewife from St. Louis, Missouri, who in the early twentieth century wrote several books dictated by a spirit guide Patience Worth. Interestingly, that was another synchro, since Rob is currently under contract for a book called Ghosts & Spirit Guides that will come out in October of next year. In his outline for the book, he had overlooked Patience Worth, even though he was familiar with the story.

The third segment is the one where Trish appears. It’s about government mind control, specifically the case of Cheryl Welsh, who believes she was the subject of a long-term government experiment. Trish’s perspective in this case is actually as one of the skeptics – even though her solution–the Pauli Effect, or psychokinesis–is equally strange as government mind control.

That segment begins at 29:08 and Trish gets the last word on the show beginning at about 41:00.

Sometimes, skeptics and debunkers can go buggy in their attempts to dismiss UFO sightings. That was literally the case when seven cameras recorded the flight of  several UFOs at an air show in Chile as the craft darted around a formation of jets. The object was recorded from seven different angles and positions. So it was hard to dismiss.

Yet, dismissed it was by skeptics who boastfully said it was a bug – probably a beetle flying in front of the camera. The skeptics had looked at only one video when the pronouncement was made. The skeptics apparently had no expertise in examining digital images.

But others did. One Chilean analyst, Alberto Vergara, an expert in digital imaging, reported: “When we examine the whole scene frame by frame, we have been able to realize that [the object] has, apparently, moved at a speed far superior to any flying object of known manufacture. Therefore it is worthy of continuing to investigate its origin.”

Meanwhile Leslie Kean, author of  UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record decided to test the skeptics’ theory and send one of the videos, as well as still shots, to three prominent American entomologists, hopefully with a knowledge of Chilean bugs.

All three said it wasn’t a bug. “No idea what it is, but it does not seem to be an insect . . . altho very fast flying insects captured on slow shutter speeds do look like amorphous blurs or blobs. I am forwarding these to several colleagues and asking around,” wrote Brett C. Ratcliffe, professor and curator at the University of Nebraska State Museum and Department of Entomology.

A few days later, he wrote back. “I have queried several of my colleagues to see if anyone might have thought an insect could be responsible for the anomaly in the images. No one had any idea of what could have caused that.”

Kean went on to find an expert in Chilean insects and sent the same material. “When Beetles fly, their wings stand up, and the membranous wings that are under are flapping.  I have seen insects flying many times and their photo looks like a torpedo, is more oval, and that is why I can not see or imagine where the legs and wings could be.” She then said she would think about this further. Her description of typical beetle photos sounded a lot like the three images shown above. She ended her comment saying, “I would say they were not insects.”

So who was acting more scientific in this investigation – the skeptics or the believers? Take a look for yourself at the video…

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

Could it be that the appearance of UFOs at an air show was intentional? A means of appearing before multiple cameras, and to keep us guessing?