Welcome to The Mystical Underground

 In January 2009,  Rob and I were casting around about starting a blog – but couldn’t seem to come up with an idea. Other friends blogged about writing and their books,  but we’ve never been big self-promoters. If anything, that has been our greatest weakness in the publishing business.

So one Saturday Rob went off to yoga and I sat outside and thought about it. What is it that intrigues us the most?  The paranormal, the mysterious, ancient archeology, UFOs, aliens, other dimensions, that answer was easy. But what binds these areas together?

And it hit me: Synchronicity.

On the first date Rob and I had in November 1981, I asked him if he knew what synchronicity was. “Sure,” he replied. “Meaningful coincidence, Carl Jung, right?”

Up to that point in my life, I’d asked a lot of men that same question and I think Rob was the first one who answered it correctly. I decided I wanted to get to know him.

So when Rob got home from yoga that January in 2009, I said that I thought we should start blogging about synchronicity.  He protested, he ticked off reasons why it wouldn’t work, but I knew where to start. I did some research and decided blogger was the easiest format to use. “Let’s at least try it,” I said.

And we did. On February 4, 2009, we published our first post, The Deeper Meaning of Things.

We signed up for a Google alert for synchronicity and began following other bloggers who wrote about the topic, commenting on their blogs. Slowly – very slowly – we made connections with other people who wrote about and had a solid grasp of synchronicity.

In 2010, our blog was hacked by an anonymous commenter, a diehard skeptic about alien life etc.  Three of our computers were destroyed and the hacker took over our blog for five or six hours. He posted an apology to himself that was allegedly written by Rob. By then we knew who he was  and where he lived and filed a report with the FBI. We also bought new computers and moved our blog to WordPress.

That process alone took about five hours, with more than 12,000 posts and comments. Some comments were lost, all the links were lost, and so were our followers. At that point, we’d had nearly 200,000 hits from 175 countries. Fortunately, we had a word file with some of our fellow bloggers URLs and email addresses, and over the next several months were able to re-establish contact with some of them.

So today, on the fifth anniversary of our blog’s birth, I’m happy to report that we’ve written several thousand posts on synchronicity  in its myriad manifestations – with some dog park and political posts tossed into the mix. We’ve met synchro bloggers from other continents whose knowledge and experiences have added to the collective soup about what synchronicity is. And the blog has resulted in four books on the various components of synchronicity and connected us to many people who are experiencing the phenomenon in unique ways.

Skeptics – like the virulent jerk who hacked our computers and blog – serve to remind us of the dying paradigm. And that belief system says nothing and no one is connected to anything or anyone else, that we live in a random universe where nothing makes sense. To the skeptics, we say, We say, Rock on, synchro experiencers! All of us are defining the new paradigm, fleshing it out, ushering in a new understanding.

And thanks to you all for contributing your stories and experiences for five years – and counting!

 Let me state right off that I’m not into football. Never have been. The sports strikes me as incredibly violent. Players sustain injuries that plague them the rest of their lives. That said, they choose to play this sport and, in some instances the players are so great you know they are pursing their passions.

This evening, Rob and I went over to Bruce Gernon’s place to watch the game. Bruce is Rob’s co-author for The Fog, and every year he and his wife Lynn put out quite a spread for the Super Bowl. Lynn is a gourmet cook and they have an 80 inch TV that covers the entire wall in their living room. The quality of the image is so high def you feel like you’re in the stands, that you’re there. I actually enjoyed watching the game.

The minute I saw the Seahawks mascot – an actual hawk – I knew they were going to win. The hawk is a powerful totem – able to see the larger picture from way above the crowd, its vision almost unsurpassed in the animal kingdom. This predator flies at between 20 and 40 miles an hour. And in some of these touchdowns the Sea Hawk players made, the players seemed to be moving that fast.

But it wasn’t until one of the sportscasters mentioned player Russell Wilson and what his father had said to him that I realized there was a deeper message in this game.  His father had said to hm, Why not you? There’s probably nothing more powerful that a parent can say to a child (except I love you). Wilson took this and revised it and said, Why not us?

And the Sea Hawks went on to pound the Denver Broncos at 43 to 8. The message of this triumph, the deeper message about belief and the fact that nearly 200 million people watched this game – that’s a LOT of energy! – emphasizes a synchro. These teams  are from the two most recent states – Colorado and Washington – to legalize marijuana. Weird, huh?

After a dry spell during many months of 2013 when we had to dig into our savings, we’ve suddenly been inundated with offers of new writing projects—ghost-writing a novel, writing an astrology book, preparing the content for an astrology APP. It seems that something has turned in 2014, a breath of fresh air, an aura of abundance. Along with new projects came synchronicity, suggesting we were on the right path, that these projects would keep us going while even bigger things are percolating.  Here’s one such example.

I took a break from working on the astrology book proposal, went to the bank and was standing in line, when it happened. As I waited, the astrology stuff still on my mind, I heard someone say Sagittarius. I looked over to my right and saw three bankers, including one I knew as the bank’s vice president, chatting about their astrology signs. To my surprise, the three carried on quite awhile, noting the traits of their signs and seemingly accepting them as true. I stared, somewhat amazed. Bankers talking about astrology, and not in hushed voices or with any cynicism.

Then I was called to the window and I heard no more astro-talk. I thought it was interesting that it wasn’t the tellers talking among themselves, but the bankers – the professional money people –  ones I wouldn’t associate with astrology chatter.

But polls have consistently shown that 25% of the American population accept astrology. That, in spite of all the efforts over the decades by mainstream scientists and educators to debunk astrology. Twenty-five percent is more than 75 million people…and some of them are bankers.

I saw the brief experience as a perfect synchro for the day, for the month, for the year. I was thinking about astrology – an inner event – when the bankers began talking about the same subject – an outer event. The two came together, outside of cause and effect, and it was truly a meaningful coincidence. The bankers symbolize money, of course. (That’s why I added their sign to the astrological signs for the image above.) And that symbolism bodes well for the new year.

The other day daughter Megan was telling us about her night out in downtown Orlando where she lives. Besides her Paint Nite  job as ‘master artist’ —that’s actually her job title—and her dog-walking business, she and a couple of friends like to dress in bear costumes and go to the downtown bars. They dance and frolic about, pose for pictures with tourists (who probably think the bears are a night-time extension of Disney World), and sometimes get free drinks and substantial tips.

But the other night something somewhat disturbing happened. It was late and some people had too much to drink and suddenly, for no apparent reason, they started pushing the bears— ‘No bears allowed here!’ — and Megan was knocked off her feet. She was okay, and one of the men apologized when he discovered a girl was inside the costume. The bears moved on to avoid any further troubles, and called it a night. She still likes the bear costume gig, but now she’s a bit more wary about doing it.

After we hung up, I turned back to the web page I was reading. It was dense copy, an article with several hundred words showing on the screen. But my gaze zeroed in to a phrase in the middle of the page. It took a moment to register why those words held my attention. The phrase was ‘bears out,’ as in something that bears out.

Of course, bears out, I thought. A synchro. I had just heard a story of what happened when the bears were out. It’s a little one, nothing earth shaking, but the type of synchro that seem to occur daily…if I keep my eyes open. After all, awareness is a big part of synchronicity. Sometimes they’re easy to miss. They pass right by untouched, unconsidered.

Like the story of the deputy chief of staff for Chris Christie who ordered the now infamous bridge closing in New Jersey. Bridget Kelly. Bridge it! I didn’t see it until Gypsy mentioned it in a comment here recently. Duh, how did I miss that? Bridget Kelly meet Anthony Weiner. You two have something in common! – Rob

Mountain Astrology  is a bi-monthly magazine that features some of the most unusual articles  on astrology that I’ve ever come across. In the newest edition – February/ March 2014 – there’s an article entitled A Tour of Personal-Named Asteroids by Alex Miller that is so full of jaw-dropping synchronicities that when I started reading the article, I though it had to be bogus.

In astrology the most common asteroids that are used are Chiron, Vesta, Pallas, Juno, and Ceres. Each one has a particular meaning based, in part, on mythology. But the author of this article uses something called personal-named asteroids, which I’d never heard of – and maybe I’m showing my ignorance here. The asteroid name data came from the Minor Planet Center.

The author states that of the estimated 1.9 million minor bodies in the solar system, a quarter of them have been registered, 108,000 have been numbered and their orbits computed, and more than 17,000 have been named. It used to be that asteroids were named for deities, as the first five I mentioned, with Greek or Roman mythic derivation. But as their numbers have increased dramatically since the 1800s, the deity/mythic tradition was dropped and now, asteroids are named by their discovers, with the approval of the International Astronomical Union.

So, here are the first jaw-dropping examples he gives:

“Bill Clinton has asteroid Monica opposed asteroid Hillary (with asteroids Lies and Lust also prominent).  Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head when asteroids Gabriella and Gifford were in tight square to transiting Mars.

 “Asteroids Osamu and George were together on the Ascendant of the chart for the first plane crash at World Trade Center 1 on 9/11, with asteroid Bush conjoining Uranus and forming a grand trine with the Moon and asteroid America.”

 Even if you don’t know much about astrology, the name synchros here are astonishing. But when you add the astrological angle, they become even more so. In the example about Gabriella Giffords: a square is an aspect of friction and Mars is the planet that governs, among other things, aggression, war, violence.

In the 9-11 example: With asteroid Bush conjuncting Uranus, the planet of sudden, unexpected change, of events that shake us out of our ruts and routines (9-11 sure did that), we have the literal connection of the Bush presidency to 9-11. It happened under his watch. The fact that moon was trining asteroid America at the same moment is another literal connection. The moon symbolizes the masses, the public, and for days and weeks and months afterward, our collective attention was focused on the fallout of 9-11.

The author goes into a lot of astrological detail abut these events that I won’t include here, it’s too lengthy. The other examples he provides, though, are just as mind-boggling. Asteroids James, Holmes, and Aurora “formed eerily prominent patterns in the sky when James Holmes opened fire in an Aurora, Colorado movie theater, killing 12 and wounding 58.”

The author also gives two riveting personal examples  dealing with his uncle and his mother that are equally astounding. The one about his mother is rather lengthy, so here’s the shorter story about his uncle, David Miller, who passed away on March 14, 2011. “On that date, asteroids Davida and Miller were exactly conjuncting transiting Pluto (representing death)… Yes, sometimes it’s really that stark!”

He calls these events “celestial nomenclature synchronicities.” In other words, name synchros.

Miller concludes his article in a way that underscores just how mind-blowing his discoveries were on a personal level. “How can it be that these points – which are casually, often cavalierly, named by total strangers with no astronomical knowledge or intent and not the slightest concept of their eventual application –  will emphatically resonate with people and events for whom these names are meaningful? How can celestial bodies, discovered and named long after the births of those whose lives they will impact, be retroactively inserted into their horoscopes to define relationships?  And how do these asteroids continue to operate, by transit, in unfolding events within which they are significant?

“Well, when I’ve figured that out, I’ll let you know…”

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After reading this article, I started searching for asteroids named Rob, Trish, or Megan…

At least ten years ago, Rob wrote a young adult novel called 7^th Born. It’s set in a fictional South Florida town, Westfield, an equestrian community fashioned after Wellington, where we live, the polo capital of the world.

The protagonist, Marlina, 16, is the seventh born of a seventh born psychic and her talents are starting to manifest themselves. Because Rob wrote the novel under his own name and the protagonist was a female teenager, the novel’s rejections tended to focus on the fact that he was a guy and how could he possibly know what a teenage girl felt and thought?

That critique is somewhat specious. Men often write from a female perspective. One of the most famous examples of this is Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. And women often write from a male perspective – take J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter. It’s not about the gender of the character so much as it is the writer’s grasp of the character’s heart and soul, what he or she feels.

At any rate, 7^th Born has found a home at Crossroad Press, where we now have many of our backlist titles and some of our original books, like Aliens in the Backyard and The Synchronicity Highway.  The other day, Rob and I were talking about this novel, which has always been one of my personal favorites.

He decided to  write David Wilson and his partner in the business, David Dodd, to find out where the book was in the formatting stage. It turned out that David Dodd, who does the formatting and the spectacular illustrations for the book (while holding down a full-time job elsewhere) already had formatted it – for Kindle, the Apple store, the Nook – and sent Rob a copy. That in itself was a synchro since the book was sent to Crossroad weeks ago and we’d forgotten about it until we started talking about it.

Rob wanted a copy so he could give it to an expert in the equestrian field who could check it for accuracy. He was particularly interested in accuracy about the nerve agent a corrupt vet uses on the horses that renders them useless as competitors; about the competitions generally; and about horses. Even though we’ve lived here for 14 years, have attended polo matches and competitions and our daughter rides,  we don’t know much about horses, per se.

So once Rob got the formatted e-book, he sent it to our housemate, Cassie, for her iPad. She has worked in the business for more than twenty years and has traveled all over Europe with her various employers and their horses. Cassie’s employers have all been uber wealthy, the clear one percent. They have to be in order to own million dollar horses, to ship them from one country to another for competitions, to pay for grooms, trainers, managers, and oh yes, those vet bills.

Cassie read the book in a couple of evenings – amazing, since she works 12 hours a day. On the night she reached the last few chapters she came running into my office.

“Trish, when did Rob write this book?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a decade ago. Why?”

“Can I read you something?”

“Sure.”

“It’s a synchro.” And she read me a passage in 7^th Born where the ferrier  has left for the horse season and moved back to  the Biltmore estate in Asheville, North Carolina. Cassie paused and peered at me over the rim of her glasses.  “It blew me away. In April, I’m headed for the Biltmore.”

Cassie, like the fictional ferrier Rob wrote about ten years ago, works for the Vanderbilts, and their home out of season is the Biltmore estate in Asheville. Cassie, like the ferrier, will be living on the 8,000 acres of the estate with her two border collies and her horse.

Who could make this stuff up?

Most of us spend about a third of our lives sleeping – and dreaming.  Sometimes our dreaming lives seem whimsical, silly, outrageous. But more often than we realize, our dreams can provide insights into concerns in our waking lives  and can also offer creative ideas.

Brahms, Puccini, and Wagner, for instance, all claimed that their musical ideas often were born during hypnogogic states of consciousness, that strange netherworld we enter as we’re falling asleep. Mary Shelley said her idea for Frankenstein came about as a result of horrifying hypnogogic images. It makes sense.

As we’re falling asleep, we’re entering another state of consciousness, where our logical left brain goes dormant and our right brain, that creative side of the brain,  comes awake.

Stephen King refers to the writing of a novel as “dreaming awake,” and I know what he means. When you’re plugged into a story, the rest of the world vanishes. It’s just you – and the characters, the story, all of it unfolding in a kind of dreamlike state.

Thomas Edison used to take catnaps when he was stuck on a particular problem. When Einstein was stuck in his formulation about the theory of relativity, he supposedly took a nap and woke up with the answer. It’s as if intense left-brain activity needs to take a break at some point. It needs help from the right brain, and despite its resistance to that help, physical exhaustion takes over and the right brain rises to do its thing.

Creativity is an innate ability in all of us and one way or another, finds expression in our lives. Some years ago, an old friend of mine from my childhood in Caracas visited us and remarked how she didn’t feel creative at all. I was shocked. She’s a Sagittarius, and one of the things this sign is known for is its nomadic tendencies, its love of travel. She had spent nearly 20 years as flight attendant for Pan American Airways and has probably traveled to every continent except Antarctica. Travel is your creative outlet, I told her, and her eyes lit up and I knew she suddenly understood that creativity isn’t just about a physical product.

Creativity is an inner journey, a spiritual journey. It might be who we are when we aren’t resisting who we are. Maybe it’s one of the most direct routes to experiencing synchronicity, which tends to occur more frequently when we’re in an intensely creative period in our lives. In 7 Secrets of Synchronicity, creativity is one of the secrets.

During this hypnogogic period of sleep, our physical bodies undergo big changes – intense relaxation, a drop in blood pressure, a slowing of heart and breathing rates. We let go of our conscious lives. And by doing so, we sink into what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious, what physicist David Bohm called the implicate or enfolded order of the universe, a primordial soup that births everything, perhaps even space and time.

Pretty cool. Is it possible to dream a better world into existence? A more equitable world where no one goes to sleep hungry? Where war is a tragic anachronism of a prehistoric past?

May the creative flame burn in all of us. Dream on!

 Recently, a Google alert came through for synchronicity that led to a piece in the Huffington Post.

It starts off in a positive way, talking about Jung and the golden scarab that led to his theory about synchronicity, what synchronicity is. The  article even mentions the Wilhelm edition of the I Ching, to which Jung wrote the forward  in 1949, the first time he “came out” about synchronicity.

And then, rather predictably, the article veers in this direction:

“So how, and why, did these events occur? Jung argued that the psychic event (for instance, the dream of the scarab) and the coinciding physical event (the actual scarab on the window) are objects “of the same quality,” which causes them to co-occur, or coincide. It’s an interesting theory, but because of the lack of scientific backing, many psychologists since have been unsatisfied with Jung’s answers.

“Post-Jung, some psychologists and statisticians have held a more skeptical view about the meaning of coincidences, which they say can be explained away by a common (and fallacious) habit of mind.

“Our inclination to find connections and patters in random data is what’s known in psychology as apophenia. So when we spot a coincidence, what’s really happening is that our brain is simply exercising its fundamental ability to identify patterns — something we can do even when there are none, statistically speaking.”

Wait a minute. If we recognize significance in synchroncities, we’re actually suffering from some sort of cognitive dysfunction called apophenia?  According to the article, coincidences may be explained by “cognitive biases” that keep us from seeing casual connections between coinciding events. This explanation sounds an awful lot like that of professional skeptic Michael Shermer, who experienced a synchronicity we wrote about in The Synchronicity Highway and  then went to great lengths to discredit his own experience. 

The article cites an abstract by a couple of men in the psychology department at Stanford. The abstract is entitled, Randomness and Coincidences: Reconciling Intuition and Probability Theory.  Once again, science/psychology goes to great lengths to explain away the significance of meaningful coincidence.

In many ways, this entire sequence of arguments against synchronicity as significant strikes me as the desperate gasp of a dying paradigm. You know the paradigm I’m talking about – the one that says everything you experience is random, we live in a random universe where nothing is connected to anything else, where we are quasi mechanical beings in a materialistic universe and that’s it, folks, so sorry.

The Huffington Post article ends with this paragraph:

“[Coincidence is] a porthole into one of the most interesting philosophical questions we can ask: Are the events of our lives ultimately objective or subjective?,” writes Jill Neimark in Psychology Today. ‘Is there a deeper order, an overarching purpose to the universe? Or are we the lucky accidents of evolution, living our precious but brief lives in a fundamentally random world that has only the meaning we choose to give it?’”

Really? That’s the best conclusion the author could provide? Well, how about this as a counter-argument, a quote from Jung: “Synchronicity is an ever present reality for those who have the eyes to see.”

(Psychology Today is the ‘popular front,’ the media spearhead, of the dying old paradigm. If there’s any doubt about that, take a look at our post on the magazine from July 2012 about a proposal we submitted for an article about synchronicity that cited a researcher who has strayed from the old accepted ways and recognized meaningful coincidence. Not only did they not bother to respond to us, but they scoured our blog—as we documented—then assigned a derogatory article about synchronicity that read like something out of People Magazine.)

The problem here is that the dying paradigm seems to be threatened by the very notion that perhaps the world and our experience of it is more than what our five senses tell us. Perhaps quantum physicist David Bohm hit the truth when he said that synchronicity may hint at a deeper order in the universe, one he called the implicate or enfolded order, a kind of primordial soup that births everything in the universe. Bohm believed that even time unfolds from this implicate order and that our external reality is the unfolded or explicate order. Synchronicity, then, is where the implicate and explicate, the inner and the outer, meet.

Once you’re aware of meaningful coincidence, it seems to be everywhere. You recognize it in the oddest places, at the strangest junctures.  Past life researcher and author Carol Bowman has noted its occurrence in past lives and our recollection of those lives. Her next book is about this very topic.  Interestingly, Huffington Post had an article by a physician about this very thing.

I suspect that as we move farther into the 21st century, the old paradigm will continue to fall apart as humanity’s collective experiences confirm what the mystics have known all along. As William Blake put it: “To see the world in a grain of sand…”

Alexis Brooks is an author of self-help/New Age books and host of Conscious Inquiry Radio. Alexis interviewed us for her show recently, and you can hear that interview here. We had a great time talking with Alexis. She’s very knowledgeable and it’s always great to talk about this ‘weird’ stuff with someone who understands and doesn’t think it’s weird at all. In other words, we were on the same wave length.

Before the interview, she had read The Synchronicity Highway, which inspired her to write a blog post. We’re posting an excerpt  below, and you can read the entire post here.

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In Trish and Rob MacGregor’s excellent new book, The Synchronicity Highway, they say, “…your guidance system lies in your awareness, curiosity, feelings, intentions, and beliefs.  It lies within.  Once you trust that inner guidance, synchronicities seem to pop-up everywhere.  They are signposts, friends, allies that guide and direct you, warn you, clarify and confirm your decisions, laugh at you and with you.”

It seems to me that if there were any time in history where this ally is greatly needed, it is now.  Synchronicity is still one of those less understood and yet persistent anomalies that we’ve all encountered at one time or another.  We’d have occasional coincidences – acknowledge them and invariably shrug them off.  They’d just pop into view or earshot and show themselves just enough to give us a chuckle or a “hmm, interesting.”

For those who have a sneaking suspicion that there’s more to synchronicity than meets the (mind’s) eye, my suggestion is that we consider taking their presence just a bit more seriously.  In fact, why not enter into an agreement with the Universe to commit to seeing them more often and then utilizing them to navigate this rollercoaster ride?

The point:  We do have a guidance system, an inner GPS if you will, that if yielded will guide us, and without the necessary DVD upgrades to boot.  It doesn’t falter or fail – it just gives information and I truly sense it has our best interest at heart.  Its only caveat?  Pay attention!  So even though the roller coaster of life has managed to build an infrastructure with increasingly more dips and curves, perhaps the purpose is to get us to take it on in order to tame it, to ride it through and to change the course altogether…”hmm, interesting!!”

The Current Times

I’ve always found it intriguing how the English language tends to have multiple definitions and yet a singular and fundamental connection.  Take the word “current.”  In one definition, current denotes a time of now, of present – our current situation.  But current also means, flow – something that moves, that is agile and not resistant to change.  What current are you experiencing?  Are you flowing with it or against it?  Might the presence of synchronicity (once recognized) be your compass to navigate the current with more agility?  It’s something to contemplate for sure!  And once you do?

All of reality becomes meaningful…

Getting back to the MacGregor’s book in which they beautifully illustrate how synchronicity is key to understanding the myriad ways the Universe works to communicate with us, let’s talk about 11!  What is it?  Why is it? And more importantly what about its presence as it relates to the current times?

Here is an excerpt from their book, Synchronicity Highway that might give us a clue:

“Carl Jung considered numbers to be archetypal and believed that when you experience clusters of a particular number, it has become active within your psyche.  It apparently stays active until you get the message.  The message of 11:11 seems to be about evolution of consciousness, that you’re being ushered into a greater reality, the flow (yes – the current!) of universal energy.  It can also act as a warning and as confirmation.”

It appears that these current times are critical – monumental in fact.  And the thousands, no – millions who are and have been experiencing the 11’s on a regular basis are indicative of the fact that our current times are nudging us to graduate to a level of consciousness that will ironically release the lock-hold of finite potential and open the doors to in-finite reality – a reality that will imbue us with the realization that we are not mortal (mediocre, average, everyday) humans but immortal (infinite, extraordinary, creative) spiritual energy, and once set free ( and recognize this through synchronicity), we will fly!

 Back in the late 1980s, Rob and I had a chance to write about the making of Miami Vice – the original Vice, with Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas. Doing this project for Ballantine Books was great fun. We got onto the Vice set in Miami, were flown out to LA to talk with director Michael Mann and whoever else would give us the time of the day. But what’s really interesting about the project is how it came full circle with one of the people we interviewed.

Even though the two stars – Johnson and Thomas – refused to be interviewed for the book, the people who did talk to us were just great. One of the nicest men we met during this project was Ernie Robinson, who doubled for Philip Michael Thomas on stunts. When we met Robinson, he was 53 and looked twenty years younger. He stood nearly six feet tall, weighed 163 pounds, and was built similar to Thomas except in the legs. When he had started in the business in the 1960s, there were few qualified black stunt men.

“I was involved with the Tenth Cavalry – an equestrian outfit – and through them I met white stunt men. At the time, white guys had been doubling for blacks. You  know, they used makeup and stuff.”

We asked Robinson if he’d ever doubled for a white actor and he laughed heartily, making us think the question was preposterous. “Hey, I’ve doubled for everybody even women, with wigs and clothes and all.”

His start as a stunt man was slow. But eventually he started finding jobs doubling for people like Bill Cosby, Roscoe Lee Brown, Harry Bellafonte, Sidney Poitier, and Richard Pryor. Big names. And he had nothing but nice things to say about all of them. Cosby, he said, was just as nice as he seemed. Poitier was soft-spoken, the elegant type. And Pryor? “He doesn’t even have to start any dialogue. It seems that just in conversation, he gets people cracking up. I really enjoyed working with him.”

Robinson and about 20 other black stunt men started the Black Man’s Stunt Association and he served as its president for a decade. Through the association, he trained blacks who were struggling to become stunt men and always told them the business was more dangerous than it seemed because it looked so easy.

Synchronicity was no stranger to Robinson’s life. He paid attention. When working on the movie Greased Lightning, he experienced something that he spoke about in a hushed, almost reverential tone. “I did this stunt on a track that wasn’t supposed to happen. I was just supposed to be driving. The car I was in had little tires, skinny tires, it was a period-type car. Anyway, so I was  turning sideways to start skidding on two wheels and as I brought the car back down another car went under mine. The front wheels of my car leaped off the track and the car fell fifty feet to the ground. It landed so that I could get out, and just after I did, it exploded.

“Half an hour later, this car pulls up to the track and this guy walks toward me and I knew he had bad news. He told my my father had died. I think he died at the same time I went over that fifty-foot drop. I shoulda been dead, see. I should’ve had at least a scratch. But I had nothin’, not even a bump on the head.”

Fast forward decades. This morning, one of the emails in my box was from a woman named Nonie L Robinson, who had tweeted:

Rob and Trish | https://www.synchrosecrets.com/synchrosecrets/?p=12830 … via @trishmac – Thank you for writing about my grandfather Ernie Robinson, Stuntman on Miami Vice!!

 We had written up this very synchro in November 2012. I wrote her back and told her he was one of the nicest people we had met on the set.

Nonie has also been involved in movies and TV.  I somehow find this full circle stuff quite gratifying!

Crossroad has since brought the book back into ebook and audio format. On Amazon, the sole review of the ebook illustrates a basic misunderstanding of how these kinds of projects worked then and now. Our instructions with this project amounted to: This is not a hatchet job.

And really, other than the fact that the two principal stars refused to be interviewed, there was little to criticize. Michael Mann ran a tight ship. He knew his characters, the location and the story. But he also gave his actors the freedom to make their own decisions. When we mentioned that Johnson and Thomas didn’t want to be interviewed, he shrugged. “I can’t make them talk to you. Write around them.”

So we did. In the end, they were pretty much incidental to the book.