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Rob turned on the news this evening to check on the Republican convention. I listened to some of it from my office, but couldn’t bring myself to actually watch much of it because it made me want to gag. What I heard confirms several things for me:

The Republican memory is short. They talk about small government, yet under W Bush, the federal government exploded with the creation of Homeland Security, the TSA, unprecedented surveillance on the American people, two wars that were never formally declared by Congress, and the defense budget bloomed. Small government, uh-huh.

The Republican platform is about them against us. Pick your them – it doesn’t matter what name you give them, what religion they abide by, what country they come from. We’ve heard Trump tirades about Mexicans, Muslims, women, blacks, Hispanics from any country, it doesn’t matter. If you are non-white, a woman of any color, and DON’T believe we must be the world cop and invade any country that pisses us off, then you are part of THEM.

The Republican Party is in its death throes, but the death may be long and prolonged and could take us through four years of a Trump presidency, through four years of something that smacks of Fascism, of a kind of concentration camp mentality. Imagine it: a first lady who has posed nude in her fashion career; a president with orange hair who has declared bankruptcy four times and yet calls himself a business whiz; a president who will throw a temper tantrum worthy of a two-year-old if he doesn’t get his way… well, I could go on.   The list is long.

Right now, his wife is speaking on his behalf. Donald, she claims, is for all Americans, rich and poor and middle class; Muslim and Asian, Hispanic and blacks, young and old and everything in between. Yes siree, the Donald is America’s savior because he LOVES this country and will KEEP AMERICA SAFE, something no Democratic has ever done.

Again, selective memory: 911 happened under the watch of W Bush, Republican.

Trump’s entire platform for this convention is based on Richard Nixon’s – be afraid of everything in the world and rest assured that I will keep you safe. In fact, fear was the theme of the first day of the convention. Be afraid, be very afraid because things are crazy out there. Black Lives Matter and Islamic terrorism all rolled into one. But help is on the way: Trump will be the law and order president.

Until this moment, I wasn’t going to vote for Clinton because I don’t trust her. Never have. She’s a hawk and my gut tells me that even though she has adopted some of the points in Bernie’s platform that galvanized millions of young people, it may be just rhetoric.

Now I don‘t see any choice but to vote for her because it’s obvious that Trump isn’t just suffering from narcissism and megalomania, he and his supporters live in an alternate universe, where the 1950s never ended. If you’re different than the norm of that era – gay, a black married to a white, an atheist, a woman who seeks to end a pregnancy, someone who doesn’t cheer war, invasion, and hatred of people whose religious beliefs are different than yours – then you’re suspect. In 2005, I think it was, we were in the Dominican Republican, sitting at breakfast. A French man at the next table turned to us and said, “What’s wrong with you Americans? How could you elect W Bush?”

“We didn’t vote for him,” I snapped back.

I can imagine similar questions would be tossed our way if we traveled overseas under a Trump candidacy. Trump’s campaign promise of sending 11 million illegals back to Mexico and barring Muslims from entering the country excite his base, but are stupid and impractical ideas. How do tell someone is a Muslim? There are Christians in every Muslim country in the world. How are the border guards going to know one from the other? It’s like the right’s argument about guns: Take away the guns and only the criminals will have guns. Block all Muslims from entering the country and only the terrorists will enter the country by hiding under the veil of Christianity.

Stupid ideas. Schizoid ideas. But, bottom line, these are the kinds of ideas entertained by the deranged in padded cells.

Now, excuse me while I go sob.

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Jim Moseley, who died in 2012, was an old time ufologist who started a magazine called Flying Saucer News in the 1950s that reported sightings. Later, he changed the title to Saucer Smear and reported on the sociology of ufology with a lot of tongue in cheek humor. He went after debunkers and believers alike with equal glee. He especially took to task those who were full of themselves as experts on a subject that floats between reality and the absurd. Needless to say, Jim tended to annoy a lot of people who were serious about their exploration, their investigations,  their debunking, or whatever. The Amazing Randi threatened to sue him more than once.

We knew Jim since the 1980s, stayed once at Rose Lane Villas that he owned for years his Key West and we also saw him shortly before his death when he lived in a drab room on the outskirts of Old Town. We had a couple of adventures with Jim running into the Amazing Randi once with him in Fort Lauderdale, and another time venturing into the attic of an old house near Rose Lane Villas that used to be a Ford plant in the 1920s, where we found a casket and skeleton. Yikes! We left quickly.

This April, I noticed that the Saucer Smear web site still existed. So I left him a message:

Hi Jim, How are things on the Other Side? Mixing it with the alien presence? Glad we had a chance to have one last dinner in Key West before you moved on. Hey, it was time to get out of that dumpy room, right? Catch you later. Rob MacGregor

This morning, July 13, I got a response of sorts. On the side of my FB home page in the advertising column, this image popped up:

Thanks, Jim.

33 years.

That’s nearly half my life.

On July 16, 1983 at 12:30 P.M., Rob and I stood in my parent’s living room and were married by an Episcopalian minister. I think that was his denomination, but regardless, he was a well-intentioned man, my compromise with my mother to have some religious figure marry us.

My sister was my maid of honor, and I think Rob’s best guy was her husband. There were maybe 30 people in the living room, including Rob’s parents, sister, nephew, and a few friends. At the party afterward, at a country club where my parents belonged, there were several times that.

I remember feeling awkward at that party, where a lot of my parents’ friends, people I didn’t really know, congratulated us. I was eager to get moving on the honeymoon part of the whole thing, where we were going to Ecuador and Chile for six weeks, an adventure that spoke to some deeper part of me, of him, of us.

We made that trip on Ladeco Airlines, a new airline with an unbelievable deal –$250 per person round trip, I think it was, their celebratory intro to the airline world. Ladeco went under years ago, but their service was first class. Synchronicity was our companion on that trip. We happened to sit next to a Chilean woman and when I asked her where in Chile we would find myths, lore, mystery, she said, “Chiloe. That island is incredible.” Ghost ships, she said. Mermaids.

It sounded like our kind of place.

What I didn’t realize then is the way the texture of certain events at pivotal moments in our lives continue to impact us long afterward. The strange mysteries Rob and I experienced during those six weeks of our honeymoon have been with us ever since. They have helped to define our passions – what we write about, research, explore, the very nature of our creative thrusts in this lifetime.
When Megan joined our little clan six years later, in 1989, we didn’t understand how she would expand our passions and our creativity with her own perceptions. We’re seeing it now in her artistic pursuits.

So, once again, I am left with a big fat question: Who orchestrates this stuff?

Happy 33rd, Rob, and may we continue to delve into and write about the real mysteries!

Okay, this is a weird synchronicity but a good one.

On Rob’s birthday, we were in Orlando to celebrate and went out to dinner with our daughter to a place called Hawker’s. The idea here is that you order a number of tapas that everyone at your table can share. One of our platters included shrimp, and Rob helped himself to a single shrimp. Twice in the past three years, he has developed a swollen second toe after eating shrimp, a condition that was initially diagnosed as gout.

Since that first flare-up, he avoids shrimp. I no longer buy it when I grocery shop. But on this particular night, it being his birthday and all, he helped himself to a single shrimp. The next day, he flew to Minneapolis to start cleaning out his mother’s house to put it on the market because she recently went into an assisted living facility. On his second day there, his second toe started swelling.

Two weeks later, the toe was still swollen, red, deformed. He hobbled when he walked. It was difficult to do certain yoga positions when he taught his classes. We had done the Google research on gout and discovered which foods should be avoided. We had talked to other people who suffered flareups of gout and knew which drugs helped. I suggested we hit Whole Foods and see what holistic remedies they carried for gout.

I love our Whole Foods. Even though many – but not all – of their items are more expensive than our local Publix, I find that their employees actually know what they’re talking about. I went into the vitamin area and asked an employee what remedies they had for gout.

“Right over here,” she said, leading me up an aisle. “My husband has occasional flare-ups and we have a product that works for him every time.”

The product, Gouch, was priced at 23 bucks and change. “He’s in the midst of a flare-up,” I told her. “What dosage do you recommend?”

“It says two capsules, but when my husband has a flare-up, he takes three or four. This stuff works. After the flare-up is gone, he stops taking it.”

Into my basket it went.

That day, Rob took 4 capsules. By the next morning, the redness was gone, he could move his toe more freely. It still looked malformed, grotesque, a hunchback from another star system, but it no longer hurt and it didn’t feel hot to the touch. Today, it’s even better.

So here’s the synchronicity. We went to Whole Foods looking for a holistic remedy for gout. The first employee I asked not only knew the remedy, but her husband had used it for flare-ups and it had worked. I remarked that it was a beneficial synchro and Rob’s response was that it was a synchro only if it worked for him. Well, Rob, it appears to be working for you. Can we now call it a synchro?

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UNSPECIFIED, CHINA – JULY 03: Workers lift the last panel to install into the center of a Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) on July 3, 2016, China. The dish-like telescope, as large as 30 football fields, costing 1.2 billion yuan (about 180 million USD), will be used for research and further adjustment according to China Daily. (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images)

Astronomer Carl Sagan would be very impressed with this telescope, I’m sure. It will be used to search for alien life in deep space. That’s where Sagan thought other intelligent life forms would be found. He thought that UFOs were ordinary objects that were being misidentified. He rejected the idea that they were vehicles from elsewhere.

While Sagan was a well known as a skeptic/debunker of UFOs, earlier in his career he had other ideas.  In fact, he was a major player in 1969 in an attempt to get scientists interested in studying the UFO phenomena through a symposium by the American Association of the Advancement of Science (AAAS). But debunkers managed to get the symposium cancelled. At least one of them, Donald Menzel, lived a double-life as an astrophysicist and also as a player in the government’s debunking mission, one who held high level security clearance. Since then, mainstream science has looked away from any evidence that alien life might already be visiting us.

Even earlier, in 1963, Sagan had actually written about UFOs as if he were a believer. Here’s what he said:

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“It now seems quite clear that Earth is not the only inhabited planet. There is evidence that the bulk of the stars in the sky have planetary systems. Recent research concerning the origin of life on Earth suggests that the physical and chemical processes leading to the origin occur rapidly in the early history of the majority of planets. The selective value of intelligence and technical civilization is obvious, and it seems likely that a large number of planets within our Milky Way galaxy – perhaps as many as a million – are inhabited by technical civilizations in advance of our own. Interstellar space flight is far beyond our present technical capabilities, but there seems to be no fundamental physical objections to preclude, from our own vantage point, the possibility of its development by other civilizations.”

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That’s from his book, Unidentified Flying Objects,(1963). So why did Sagan turn against the possibility of UFOs as alien crafts later in his career? Could it be that he too – like Menzel –  led a double-life? Is it possible that he was on the inside with knowledge of an alien presence, but used his gentle and compelling manner to promote the debunking agenda? Maybe, maybe not.

What is clear is that the U.S. government, especially the air force, continues to dismiss and ridicule the idea that aliens are here. After reading The Presidents and UFOs: A Secret History from FDR to Obama, by Larry Holcombe, it’s clear that there has been a coverup and it continues to this day.

So as I wrote on Facebook, when I put up the above photo, I would love to see a pic of a UFO hovering about a few hundred feet this enormous telescope. Hello. Here we are.

One of our truly messy bookshelves

Our book Sensing the Future, A Field Guide to Precognition, will be published on January 3, 2017. As part of our publicity for the book, we’ve been writing to various authors who books have contributed to our knowledge, whose books we enjoy, asking if we can send them a PDF of the book in early August.   If they enjoy the book, we would be delighted to have them blurb it.

Initially, the publisher was going to provide just an excerpt from the book, which is what we said in our email to Robert Moss, whose books on dreaming , oracles, and synchronicity are terrific. He responded quickly:

Dear Trish and Rob

 I don’t “blurb” books (such an ugly word) on the basis of excerpts. Send me the whole book – by pdf if you like – and I’ll consider writing an endorsement, but can’t promise to get to this for a while.

bright blessings

The publisher agreed to send a full PDF of the book after I forwarded Moss’s email. And we used the word “endorsement” from then on. Rosemary Guiley, author of the Djinn and co-author of a book with George Noory, Talking to the Dead – also responded quickly. I loved DJinn and Rob is enjoying Talking to the Dead,  so this email was gratifying – and gracious.

Hi Trish

Congratulations! I will take a look at it. You can email it to me at…

We also contacted Rupert Sheldrake. Ever since reading his Presence of the Past in the late 1980s, we have been big fans of everything he writes. He’s a British biologist, a visionary  A few years back, TED talks banned his talk from you tube.

 Nature magazine called his work “infuriating…the best candidate for burning there has been for many years.”

Our kind of guy, for sure. The initial response to our request was answered by his research person, Pam:

Dear Trish and Rob,

Thank you for your kind email enquiry, which I will pass onto Rupert Sheldrake.  Your books sounds very interesting.  Although I need to mention Rupert is completely inundated at the moment and never endorses books he hasn’t read.  Your book is on a subject Rupert has a lot of interest in but he is awash with tottering piles of unread books.  Good luck with yours.  Best wishes

I felt this was a fairly positive response and replied that a PDF of the book would be available in early August and that if Mr. Sheldrake had worked his way through his pile of books by then, I would be glad to send him a PDF. The response to this email was from Sheldrake himself and kind of blew us away:

Dear Rob and Trish,

Thanks for your email and offer of sending the PDF of your book in due course.  As Pam says it’s very unlikely I’d be able to read it, and I never endorse books I haven’t actually read.  However I would of course be interested to look through it given that it’s close to some of my own interests. 

Best wishes,

Rupert Sheldrake

Wow!  Sheldrake isn’t just brilliant, he’s a nice guy. He’s giving himself an out in the event that he hates the book, and that’s only fair. Now compare these gracious responses from Guilley, Moss, and Sheldrake, with the complete antithesis, from a man whose books we have been buying since 1994:

As a general rule I tend to support books that either refer to my work or are sufficiently close to my interests to command my attention.  I do get a lot of requests from people seeking endorsements to do this; almost every time I speak at a different venue, someone comes up and tries to either hand me a book or make a request to have me read his or her book.  Before I consider even reading anyone’s book, I need to know the following:

   

Who is publishing the book and where, what countries is it being published in?
  In one page (under 700 words)  what is in your book that has not be said or written about before?  In brief, what is new in your book?
       

Do you reference my work in any way other than a footnote or in the bibliography?  If so, I need to see what you have written about my work.
 

I ask about (1) because I do not tend to support self-published books.  I will make exceptions, but not often.  I expect a book to have legs of its own and not depend on my endorsement to make it in the marketplace.  My endorsement means a lot to me and I don’t use it unless I really know the work and the author well enough and I believe in the work. 
      

I ask about (2) because I really don’t have time to read what people send me and I need to see that the writer has really done his or her homework and knows the field well enough to reference other people’s works and writes well enough, by providing me a short summary of what is new in his or her book, to deserve my full attention. 
   

I ask about (3) to see if the field the writer has written about is one that I have written about and have knowledge about.  If the writer has actually read any of my works and indicates that he or she has and has used my ideas in a new or original way, it goes a long way to having me support the book, even if the writer disagrees with me.
     

In brief I tend to support works that really deserve my full support because of my true interests and not just my name.

Seriously, dude? I need to write a college term paper justifying my request?  I wrote him back and answered his queries in less than the 700 words he had stipulated. His response was odd:

Could you please let me see where and how you reference my work in any way other than a footnote or in the bibliography?  I need to see what you have written about my work.  After I see this I’ll consider looking at a pdf of your book.  OK?

I’m not sure what contributes to such an inflated ego, but Rob and I have decided to delete any reference to this author in our book. And it’s unlikely that I’ll buy one of his books from this point forward.

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In the fall of 2015, we were visiting our daughter and attended one of her Paint Nite classes. Afterward, we stopped by a downtown bar and were treated to a first class magic show by Richard Waddington – whose street magician name is Richard the Adequate.

After seeing his show – and asking him a ton of questions – I friended him on Facebook. I didn’t hear anything until nine months later, shortly after the Orlando mass shooting, when I received a note that he had accepted my friend request. He apologized that he hadn’t seen my friend request. We exchanged messages and then text messages, and I told him about the blog post I’d done on him last fall and gave him the link.

His response: I’m speechless. You have honored me beyond words. Thank you. This week has been a bad one for us all. Tears of joy are so much better than tears of grief. You paid attention to my banter. Most people just watch my hands and ignore my mouth. What touched my heart the deepest was that you researched in addition. Are you a journalist?

This led to another exchange of messages where I explained that Rob and I are writers and learned  that Richard is an avid reader who devours 2-4 novels a week. Stephen King is at the top of his list and he has read most of King’s books multiple times. Richard is also writing a book and asked if I would take a look at the first chapter. I told him sure and he sent it along.

My sense is that he’s writing a memoir. He has a clear, unusual voice and a big life story – an unusual childhood in which his grandmother was a powerful influence, the loss of everything in 2006, when he ended up living under a bridge, and how magic brought him back. At any rate, I told him we would be in Orlando the following week and would love to see him perform more magic.

We met up with Richard after Megan’s Paint Nite class in a burger joint downtown. I had brought him one of King’s Dark Tower books that he said he hadn’t read, and then commented on the Bernie Sanders button on his hat, which led to the four of us talking politics. His grasp of political history is staggering. Name a president, any president, and he’ll talk about that presidency as though he was there. His grasp of religious doctrines spans the spectrum. As a young boy attending a Catholic church, he was abused by a priest and this incident launched a journey of voracious reading about every major religion and led him to the point where he is now an atheist.

When we got around to the topic of his magic, he whipped out his deck of cards and dazzled us with his wizardry. He even showed us how he does one of his card tricks but when Rob and I talked about it today, we realized neither of us understood it. He also did a very cool trick with 3 coins – a quarter, a British coin, and a Chinese coin that looked like a coin from the I Ching. He puts the three coins in his left hand, asked Megan to name one of the coins, opened his right hand, and there was the coin she’d named.

When Megan’s roommate, Nick, joined us, Richard really entered his street magician mode, blindsiding Nick with a couple of card tricks. I asked Richard for his birth data – he was born on the same day as John Lennon – and he gave me what I needed to do his chart. He’s a skeptic, but is “open-minded.” I told him I would send him some notes on his birth chart and that when he read it, he would no longer be skeptical about astrology.

Then it was time for Richard to head out to other sidewalk venues for the evening, where he would undoubtedly dazzle and entertain and blow a lot of minds. He left us with a piece of wisdom. “Magic is like politics. You distract the bystanders so they don’t see the truth of what you’re doing.”

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I sometimes go back into the blog’s earlier years and run across a post that’s puzzling, like the one below. This evening I chose a month at random – November 2011- and this post was the one that caught my eye. The post  itself is something of a synchro for me.

Earlier in the evening, I read through a chapter in the young adult book that Rob and our friend, Bruce Gernon, are writing on the Bermuda Triangle. This chapter dealt specifically with AUTEC, a U.S. Navy base on Andros Island in the Bahamas, and events that occurred in 2009, when Rob and I, Bruce and his wife, Lynn, flew there to meet with the cast and crew of UFO Hunters. AUTEC is known as the underwater area 51.

Here’s the older post, which was called UFO, Area 51 Synchro:

A friend, let’s call her Harriet (she doesn’t want her real name used) was en route to New Berne, North Carolina. She had a window seat and was peering out and saw an odd light. At first, it seemed to be dark, then it turned paler and brighter, then it began to move in an erratic way, and finally shot off quickly in a way that normal aircraft simply can’t do.

She snapped a photo with her iPhone, but it didn’t turn out clearly at all. There was too much reflection from the window.   But the woman in the seat next to Harriet saw the object, too, and the two women discussed what they thought it was.  Harriet was pretty sure she had just seen a UFO and lamented that her iPhone just couldn’t render what she saw in any clear way.

The plane landed at the New Berne Airport and Harriet hurried off to find a bite to eat. She burst out laughing when she saw the sign for the Area 51 Deli – and took the photo above. Her phone got this one clearly!   She knew it was a synchro and a confirmation of what she’d seen.

We thought it was odd that Area 51 would be mentioned at some small town airport in North Carolina. Harriet says  there’s some sort of secret military base in New Berne, so that could explain it.  There’s an element of the trickster here – even though she couldn’t get the picture she wanted, she sees Area 51 Deli s soon as she’s off the plane.

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I don’t recall the real name of the woman who sent us this, don’t even recall writing this. I guess Area 51, underwater or on land, is just around us now!

Several days ago, I received this poem from Sharlie West, a poet who lives in Maryland. I was struck by the eerie similarities between the poem and the ghost ship Caleuche, which supposedly appears in a harbor on the island of Chiloe in southern Chile. The Caleuche’s crew is manned by men in black – brujos – sorcerers who are shape shifters and abduct islanders.

Her poem prompted me to revisit the legend of the Caleuche.

Ghost Ship

He lives in the borderland

between sky and ocean’s blue

The tall sea

is in his ebony eyes,

the hint of a cold dark place

He comes for me this slivered night

a specter from a ghost ship,

tall and thin, with black eyes and

black shoes.

In his voice, the same undertow

that entered a few weeks ago

like water that freezes in the rock

and spits it open.

Tonight I’ll cup his secrets in my hands,

a white palm breeze

anoints us with liquid salt.

Seaman’s moon, hairbreadth thin.

then a mast, two more masts and

the ship approaches.

I turn my face seaward,

embrace the dark light.

It was a synchronicity that led us to the island of Chiloe, Chile, and the legend of the ghost ship Caleuche. We first heard about the ghost ship on a flight from Miami to Santiago, in July 1983. We were on our honeymoon and Chile was our first destination. We struck up a conversation with the woman who sat next to us and asked her where the mythology, the mystery, of Chile could be found. “Chiloe,” she said without hesitation.

We’d never heard of it.

“It’s an island off Puerto Montt, where land transportation ends in my country.  From Puerto Montt, you take a ferry to Chiloe. The name means land of sea gulls. There, they believe in a ghost ship, the Caleuche, that’s manned by sorcerers or brujos, who are immortal and possess the power to alter their shapes at will. They can transform themselves into wolves, fish, rocks and birds, and when they take human form, they are tall, foreign, blond.” She went on to say that some islanders believed that the ship itself could transform its shape.

We were hooked. Our synchronistic choice of seats pretty much defined our journey through Chile. Once we got to Chiloe and found a place to stay, we started our exploration.  At a local restaurant, we quickly discovered that the ghost ship wasn’t just a myth to the locals. It was based on real events that involved encounters with the brujos, who supposedly crewed  the ship. The villagers also spoke of stories of the pincoyas – the mermaids – that inhabited the waters near the island. Everything in the restaurant – from the ashtrays to the art on the walls – depicted the ship, the mermaids, the brujos.

We asked our waiter if there was anyone in town we could talk to who had seen the Caleuche. He directed us to a neighborhood down the road, where many of the homes are built on stilts that keep them above the water. “Ask anyone you see about the Caleuche.”

But first, we stopped at the pier where a fisherman offered us a local delicacy – a sea urchin cut in half, spines removed and the jelly-like innards splashed with lime juice. Rob tried one, and while he was devouring it, I asked the fishermen about mermaids. He sort of chuckled. “The legend says that when the fish are running, the mermaids face shore. When the fish are gone, the mermaids face the ocean, so their backs are to us.”

My next question – had he ever seen one – brought a response that turned out to be fairly common. “My father did.” Or, my cousin, grandmother, friend etc. But there were also people who claimed to be actual witnesses.

We walked on toward the outskirts of town and paused on a bridge, gazing out over the harbor where the Caleuche supposedly had been sighted. Chilean author Antonio Cardenas Tabies believes he sighted the ship in one of its altered forms – as a small launch that approached him and his four companions in the fog. Even though the boat passed within several feet of their boat, they didn’t see anyone on board and didn’t hear any noise from the motor.

Then Cardenas and his buddies seemed to have some sort of space/time slippage. They kept rowing for hours and at dawn, found themselves in the same spot. “We hadn’t advanced a meter in any direction,” Tabies wrote in Aboard the Caleuche, published in Santiago in 1980. But that experience led him to interview dozens of islanders who had witnessed an appearance of the ship or encountered its crew members.

Many of the experiences Tabies recounts deal with individuals who bear an uncanny resemblance to MIBs. The crew has been blamed for abductions of islanders.

One morning in 1935, when Juan Antonio Fernandez was 16, he left his home at dawn to go fishing. He recalls that he arrived at a small hill that overlooked the beach and heard a strange noise, like motors. Two days later, his family found him wandering aimlessly on the beach.

“I had a terrible scar on my chest, shaped like a gigantic hand with long, narrow fingers,” Fernandez said. “It didn’t hurt and the strange part was that it looked as if it were old.”

Author Cardenas Tabies spoke with Fernandez’s family, who said he was never quite the same after his disappearance. He was difficult, assaulted people without provocation and spoke and worked only when he was in the mood. Cardenas coaxed Fernandez  into showing him his scar. “I have never seen anything like it,” Cardenas said. “The hand covered almost his entire chest, like a scar from a severe burn. When I questioned him about it, he said that if he revealed the secret he would die.”

Armando Pacheco, a journalist and writer in Valparaiso on the Chilean mainland, theorizes that the legend of the Caleuche is so deeply ingrained that the islanders are predisposed to sightings. He contends that the Caleuche is an archetype of the collective mind of the islanders, “given reality through their intense and prolonged belief in it.”

As Sharlie asked me, are men in black an archetype?

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Bernard Beitman, a visiting professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia, and author of Connecting with Coincidence, blogs for Psychology Today on coincidence and synchronicity. In his latest post, he discusses the most common coincidences he has found in his research. These were taken from 1,551 responses to his weird coincidence survey. From the PT post:

I think of a question only to have it answered by an external source (i.e. radio, TV, or other people) before I can ask it.

I think of an idea and hear or see it on the radio, TV, or Internet.

I think of calling someone, only to have that person unexpectedly call me.

I advance in my work/career/education by being in the right place at the right time.

In descending order of frequency, the rest of the items lined up like this:

I need something, and the need is then met without my having to do anything.

I am introduced to people who unexpectedly further my work/career.

I run into a friend in an out-of-the-way place.

When my phone rings, I know who is calling without checking the screen or using personalized ring tones.

Meaningful coincidence helps determine my educational path.

I think about someone and then that person unexpectedly drops by my house or office, or passes me in the hall or street.

I experience strong emotions or physical sensations that were simultaneously experienced at a distance by someone I love

After experiencing meaningful coincidence, I analyze the meaning of my experience.

In an email, Bernard mentioned this post had gotten 2,500 hits in a week and he wasn’t sure why. He did some sleuthing and discovered that The Guardian had done a piece on his book. It’s by Oliver Burkeman and employs some of the usual tactics that skeptics use when they talk about synchronicity or anything else that can’t be explained by mainstream science.

He begins with a story in Beitman’s book about a British soldier fighting in Italy who is knocked unconscious by shell fragments. That same day in Monmouthshire, his wife was cleaning up after lunch and his daughter, two and a half, “to whom I was only a name,” suddenly went over to her mother and announced that daddy had been hurt.

Burkeman’s take: “The rationalist in me knows this all comes down to the “law of truly large numbers”, which states that, given a large enough sample, many seemingly unlikely things become downright probable. Even assuming the soldier’s memories were accurate, so many fought in the second world war that it’s almost inevitable a few would have odd stories.”

He goes on to mention another story that Beitman relates in his book, about a therapist who dreamed of an ex-patient lying immobile in a beach hut. A week later, he found out that the patient had taken an overdose in a seaside hotel and nearly died. “Spooky!” Burkeman writes. “But less so when you factor in the patients the therapist didn’t dream about – not to mention all the other therapists with no such anecdotes to relate.”

This last sentence is straight out of the skeptics’ playbook and one that Michael Shermer, founder of Skeptic magazine, uses frequently, as in this story. The punch line here  is that Shermer  ran into his agent, Scott, in Portland, Oregon, a city they both happened to be visiting.

“We were stunned,” Shermer writes. “It sure seemed like something more than a coincidence, and we both joked about how there must be some sort of scheduling god who makes these things happen.

“But Scott and I are good skeptics. We know how to think about such events. Even though such coincidences as this really stand out as unusual—and they are when I describe it in this manner—most people forget to consider all the other possibilities: the thousands of people I know who didn’t happen by that diner, the delay at the diner talking to Scott when I might have left earlier and had something else unusual happen that now didn’t, all the other cities I’ve traveled to and dined in when I didn’t see anyone I knew, and so on. And the same for Scott: he has hundreds of clients and knows thousands of people in the lecture business, any one of which he would ever happen to bump into in any given city he happened to travel to, would stand out as unusual.”

See the parallels? What’s humorous, though, is that Burkeman has trouble dismissing it all because Beitman is a psychiatrist, the first since Jung to take a serious look at synchronicity. “Still, Beitman makes an intriguing case for approaching coincidences as if they weren’t just random, whatever your beliefs. Connecting With Coincidence is full of people taking such happenings as “signs”, telling them who to marry, whether to have kids or get divorced – and it serves them rather well.”

However, there’s an upside to all this. Beitman’s website got 650 hits on the day the article in The Guardian was posted. So even publicity generated by a skeptic is good for the sale of books!

HAPPY JULY 4TH!

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