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UPDATE: Rob and I and Connie Cannon were interviewed on Whitley Strieber’s Dreamland about the unusual sighting her son had. The link to listen to it is here.

From The New Yorker

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Recently, someone asked me why I don’t go to church. It was something of a synchro for me since I had been thinking about how when I was really young, church was not only mandatory but included a catechism class taught by Catholic nuns.

In one of these catechism classes (I think I was 12) the nun was talking about heaven and death. “When you die,” she said, “you go to one of four places: heaven, purgatory, hell, or limbo. The last was the place you went if you hadn’t been baptized to clear your soul of original sin – you know, Adam’s fooling around with Eve in the garden and grabbing that apple off the tree.

I remember thinking, Huh? That’s wrong. What happens is what we believe happens. This is all a lie. After that realization, I found a reason to be sick or extremely fatigued on  Sundays, and my younger sister bore the brunt of church and catechism.  I still had to attend occasionally, but by the time I was 16 I mustered the courage to tell my dad that I just couldn’t do church anymore, that I didn’t believe a word of it.

I thought he was going to be angry, but instead he started laughing. “Fantastic. Now I don’t have to go to church anymore.”

Now, many decades later, I see organized religion as a real detriment to our evolution as spiritual and creative beings.

In North Carolina.

In Texas.

In North Dakota.

Other states have initiated  the same types of restrictions on women’s health. Why? What is it about women’s health that drives these aging white men nuts? Well, just a simple fact: these women can conceive, give birth, have children – their children –and oh my god, your child’s life begins at conception. But never mind that once this revered child is born, it’s on its own. The Repubs  don’t want to care for this child, have public education for this child, or even acknowledge this child if he or she isn’t white. In fact, they hope to restrict women’s access to birth control.

If, in today’s Republican party, you are not white and male, then, oh sorry, you don’t count. Never mind that most of American voters are female. Never mind that Hispanics are the fastest-growing minority in this country. The Repubs are playing to some extreme, shrinking base  and if they continue on this path, they won’t qualify as a national party.

But their base is powerful. I saw it today when I went to my usual beauty salon and overheard the woman who colors and cuts my hair talking about the George Zimmerman trial.

If Treyvon Martin had been white, you can bet we wouldn’t be having this trial or discussion,”  she said.

I wanted to call her on it, wanted desperately to say, Hey, hon, guess what? Racism is alive and well in South Florida, and you are its face, its reality, its heart. But I didn’t. I wasn’t up to it. But you know what? I think it’s time for me to find a new hair stylist, like a gay guy who gets it. Or a gay woman who is raising kids with her partner. Or even a straight man or woman who understands that we, as a human collective, are  at a cross road, and that what worked for us as a people and as a country in earlier decades is no longer relevant.

If we look at these events as dreams, as our blogging friend Adelita Chirino does,  what’s the message? Are we entering the realm of Margaret Atwood’s visonary novel The Handmaid’s Tale? Or  are these events necessary steps toward some greater and more humane paradigm? Right now, in the thick of it, the answer isn’t clear.

In Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, Nobel laureate Kerry Mullis writes movingly of how he received a letter in the mail that would determine his future. If memory serves, I believe it concerned whether or not he’d been admitted to the college/graduate school of his choice. He stood there, the letter in his hand, and realized that until he opened it, until he actually read it, the content was like Schrodinger’s cat, the classic quantum physics thought experiment. The cat is trapped in the box. Is it alive or dead? You don’t know until you open the box.

Until you open the box – or the letter – there is only a wave of probability. But once you open whatever it is, that wave crashes into physical reality as a particle, as the reality. I feel like that’s where we are now as a human collective: we’re Kerry Mullis, holding that letter in our hands. We’re Erwin Schrodinger, contemplating the box that holds the trapped cat. What’s it going to be? Business as usual? A new paradigm? Or something altogether new and different?

                                                                      Emerson

  The other day, I got a call from our friend Jeri Young, whose good year blimp synchro we posted here.  She had just experienced another synchro and was eager to tell me about it.

 Her husband, Steve, had called her and suggested they meet at Panera Bread for lunch. Panera is a fast-food chain that serves terrific fresh soups, salads and sandwiches, for a reasonable price.  So they put in their order, and grabbed a table. While they were eating, Jeri noticed a saying on the wall behind Steve. It was a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson that read: Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

 At about the same moment, Steve was reading the same quote on a wall behind Jeri and called her attention to it. She glanced around, laughed, and told him to look around. “I was just reading that!”

 After they got home, Jeri picked up the mail. There was a graduation announcement from Steve’s half-sister, who is just graduating from high school. When she opened it, she found a photo of the graduating class and behind them, on the wall, was the class motto. Yes, you guessed it: the same quote by Emerson.

 We’ve been running across these types of synchronicities more frequently – where a photo is involved, almost like evidence, the giant exclamation point at the end of the cluster! Rob has affectionately called them, photo-synchros.  They sort of make you feel like what our friend Cassie Hague captured in this photo. Like, OMG!

A bunch of synchros unfolded Tuesday morning, not all good, but some very strange. The day started when I read an article on the front page of the South Florida Sun Sentinel about how the police have started using a new tool called ‘SmartWater CSI’ to nab thieves. They left a bait car unlocked with a package visible. When a thief showed up and opened the door, he touched the package and his hand was sprayed with a small amount of the chemical-laced water that leaves a stain visible only under ultra-violet light. The article included photos from a video taken when the thief opened the door.

I didn’t have time to ponder how practical this watery crime-busting tool would be, because I was in a hurry to meet a friend for an off-road bike ride. I went outside and – synchronicity – I found that MY car had been burglarized. I’d forgotten to lock it last night and someone had opened the glove box and the center console, rummaged around, and made off with the garage door opener. I couldn’t help wondering how ‘SmartWater CSI’ would help me find the person who stole the opener. Not at all that I could see.

I left our 111-pound dog Noah to watch the house, and headed out to the trail for an abbreviated ride. Trish and I had a radio show coming up  mid-morning, so one lap through the woods would be all.

I rushed home and arrived half an hour ahead of time. The radio show was scheduled with Martin Willis, host of PodcastUFO and we would talk about our book, Aliens in the Backyard. We’d already had a Mercury retrograde experience with Martin. We’d thought the interview was scheduled for Monday at 1 p.m., but apparently it was a misunderstanding. When Martin didn’t call, we went about our business. I sent him an e-mail, and he apologized for the confusion and set up the interview for the following morning.

So 10 a.m. came around and again no Martin. I checked e-mail and saw a message from him labeled CANCELLATION. Now here is where it gets a bit strange. This was the message he left.

Dear Rob & Trish,

I listened to an interview this morning with you.  I have decided that I do not want to go in the direction that you two go in. I am very sorry to have wasted all your time.  Martin

Of course, we found that puzzling. What direction are we going that he doesn’t like? we wondered. We thought maybe he’s someone who thinks the aliens are here to save us from ourselves, good guys ready to help whenever we recognize they’re here and waiting.  Aliens in the Backyard takes a more cautious approach that suggests  some aliens might be helpful, others neutral, and still others committed to enslaving or eliminating us. A complicated situation, at best.

I wrote Martin back and asked him to explain what he meant. It gets stranger. Here is what he said:

I feel bad, but I am trying to stay away from the alien thing now. I am getting a lot of flack and losing people every time I go there.  Martin

Um, Martin, hello, your podcast is about UFOs. How do you separate aliens from that topic? I wrote back something to that affect and suggested that maybe he should’ve taken note of the title of our book, if not read it. I haven’t heard any more from him.

I noticed that Martin’s website features old stories of UFO sightings from long ago. Sort of a historical tribute to ufology. One about a Maury Island sighting caught my attention, since we’d just written a post about a UFO sighting in Maury county, Tennessee. We also found out that Martin just started his PodcastUFO in May and apparently is still working out the kinks, so to speak. Apparently, he needs to add a sign on his site saying: NO ALIENS ALLOWED.

Ah, Mercury retrograde meets the aliens.

Addendum: Since the interview was cancelled, we got the garage door people out to put in a new code on our opener. Our next door neighbors were also hit and they lost two garage door openers. They called the cops and sent them our way for more Mercury retrograde nonsense…but I won’t go into that.

Mercury turns direct on July 20.

Picasso’s “Girl in the Mirror”

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A doppelganger could be that image of the girl in the mirror. It’s usually defined as a ghostly double of a living person. The idea is found in mythology, folklore,  throughout various cultures, and has been used in popular culture in movies, novels,  and TV shows. Many notable individuals have seen them – the 16^th century poet John Donne,  the 18^th century Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, another 18th century poet, Abraham Lincoln, the 16^th president of the United States, Queen Elizabeth I, and the French novelist and short story writer, Guy de Maupassant.

 It’s interesting that Donne, Goethe, and Shelley were all poets. It suggests that their imaginations were well-developed and that perhaps they were deeply attuned to other realms and dimensions. Donne was in Paris when he had his doppelganger experience – but it was of his wife, who appeared holding a baby. At about this same time, she was giving birth to a stillborn daughter. Shelley’s encounter happened in Italy, where his phantom self pointed at the Mediterranean Sea. Not long afterward, Shelley drowned in a sailing accident in the Mediterranean. He was just 29.

The encounters  both Donne and Shelley experienced were certainly precognitive – the foretelling of a future event. For both of these men, that future event spelled tragedy. For Goethe, the experience was simply deeply puzzling. It happened while he was riding on the  road to Drusenheim, a city in northeast France.  Riding toward him was his exact double, who wore a gray suit trimmed in gold. Eight years later, Goethe was traveling on the same road, but in the opposite direction. He realized he was wearing the same gray suit trimmed in gold that he had seen on his double eight years earlier. So even Goethe’s encounter  was precognitive. Can a doppelganger, then, be some sort of holographic projection from the future self? Perhaps.

Neurophysiologist Karl Pribram, along with physicist David Bohm, was one of the early pioneers of the theory that we live in a holographic universe. Or, as Michael Talbott so aptly expressed it in his brilliant book The Holographic Universe, “…there is evidence to suggest that our world and everything in it – from snowflakes to maple trees to falling stars and spinning electrons – are also only ghostly images, projections from a level of reality so beyond our own it is literally beyond both space and time.”

 And if that’s the case, if we’re living in a holographic universe, then synchronicity may be one of our most direct experiences with this deeper reality. We can reach this place “beyond time and space” in dreams, during meditation, intense physical activity/competition,  heightened creative periods, during NDEs, and through other kinds of altered states. But synchronicity may be the most easily accessible conscious experience we have of this deeper reality. If so, it behooves us to pay attention.

 In an interview in 1979 in Psychology Today, Pribram  noted that it isn’t that the world of appearances is wrong. “…it isn’t that there aren’t objects  out there, at one level of reality. It’s that if you penetrate through and look at the universe with a holographic system, you arrive at a different view, a different reality. And that other reality can explain things that have hitherto remained inexplicable scientifically: paranormal phenomena, synchronicities, the apparently meaningful coincidence of events.”

Doppelgangers – and synchronicities – may also be projections from probable realities. In the early 1960s, author and mystic Jane Roberts (The Seth Material) and her husband, Robert Butts, began experimenting with a Ouija board as part of Jane’s research into ESP. It quickly became apparent to them that the material/information that came from the Ouija entity – Seth- was profound. Not long afterward, they stopped using the Ouija board and Jane began channeling Seth and Rob started transcribing these sessions. At some point between then and when they began writing the first book- The Seth Material – Jane and Rob took a break one night to go dancing.

During that evening, Jane suddenly spotted a dancing couple who looked so similar to herself and Rob that she drew her husband’s attention to the couple.  They were heavier than either Jane or Rob, didn’t look happy, had a kind of grimness about them that disturbed her. She later realized the man and woman were probable versions of herself  and Rob, the version they might have become if they  hadn’t pursued the unknown path that led them to Seth.

What else lies in this deeper reality? I suspect there are gems we haven’t discovered, truths we haven’t uncovered,  and places we haven’t even imagined. Yet.

 This evening, we re-connected with Jeri and Steve, a couple we knew when our kids were young. They lived in our former neighborhood and Megan and their oldest son, Kevin, used to play together. They thought we had moved to Asheville, and didn’t realize that for the last 17 years, Jeri has been in our area a couple of times a week to buy hay and feed for the three horses she and Steve now own.

Their kids, like Megan, are adults now, and they are dealing with aging parents. There are some eerie parallels here. Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s have figured prominently into their parents’ lives, just as they did in the lives of my parents. Steve’s mother and Jeri’s father passed away recently and whenever these kinds of big transitions happen in our lives, synchronicity is in there somewhere. And that’s how it was for them.

Steve’s mother, Jeri, and her kids always had this thing about the Good Year blimp. They would see it, exclaimed  about how cool it was, talked about riding on it. The blimp was one of those connections in the family. Like an inside joke.

The Good Year blimp is a staple in the South Florida skies. It hums along the coast and sometimes drifts inland over the Everglades. Anyone who has lived here for five seconds, has seen it. You invariably wonder how something this huge is airborne, think of the Hindenburg, and wonder how you can hop on board for a ride.

When Steve’s mother was in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s,  in an assisted living facility, they all took turns visiting her.  Steve and Jeri left their home one morning with their daughter, Nicki, to drive her to the facility for a visit with her grandmother.  Jeri noticed that the Good Year blimp seemed to be  following them. “It followed us from our neighborhood, to a Chinese restaurant, and then to the facility.”

The blimp was still behind them when they dropped Nicki at the facility, and then Jeri and Steve  headed out to run some errands. The blimp was still following them. At some point in this errand run,  Jeri got a call from the facility that Steve’s mother had just died. Jeri got off the phone. “We need to turn around,” she said. “Your mom has just passed on.”

As Steve made a quick U-turn, so did the blimp. And that was when Jeri clearly saw the message on the other side of the huge dirigible: www.alzheimersassociation.com,  the very disease Steve’s mother had. “And because the blimp was such a big deal for all of us, I knew, I just knew, it was Steve’s mother saying good-bye.”

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Synchros like this one are so powerful they leave an indelible impression. I wonder at the orchestration of all it. Are there invisible gnomes who move  pieces around on some  cosmic chessboard? How’s this kind of stuff happen, anyway?

Jeri says the blimp followed them – but perhaps it was simply following the road they were on.  Even so, why did it make that U-turn at the precise moment they did, just after they’d heard Steve’s mother had passed on, enabling Jeri to see the message on the other side? Alzheimer’s.  It could just as easily have read breast cancer or diabetes or, for that matter, google. But it didn’t read any of those things.

Our loved ones who have passed on use anything they can to communicate with us.

 Years ago, Reader’s Digest published a book called Mysteries of the Unexplained.  It’s one of the best collections of stories and anecdotes about all the stuff that interests me. I page through it from time to time and usually find some small treasure that I haven’t read before.  The story about this dollar bill is one such story.

The dollar bill pictured above was issued in Dallas just two weeks before John F. Kennedy was assassinated in that city, thus its name. Dallas was and is the location of the 11^th of the 12 Federal Reserve Bank districts. The bill has the letter K to the left of Washington’s image,  which is the 11^th letter of the alphabet.

In addition, you’ll see the #11 in each corner of the bill.  The serial number K23456789A begins with a K and ends with an A – Kennedy Assassination.

Eleven also stands for November, the 11^th month of the year, two 11s equal 22, the date he was killed, and the series number is 1963, the year of the assassination.

What are the odds? It’s like the DaVinci Code of dollar bills.

If you’ve read this post, see the UPDATE at the end about our interview with Whitley Strieber for Dreamland.

This shaky photo was taken with a cell phone, in rural Tennessee, at about 4 a.m. on June 23, by one of the abductees we wrote about in Aliens in the Backyard. He sent it to his mother, Connie Cannon, who was one of the four main experiencers featured in the book. He also called her later that morning and told her what had happened. Here is what he said…

“He told me that he sat up in the bed about 3:50 a.m. upon hearing what he described as a ‘squealing’ in his ears. He decided to go outside, (said he felt “pulled” to do that), and was stunned by what was in the sky. He went dashing back into his house and grabbed his cell phone, afraid that if he took the time to get his good camera out of its case, the object would be gone by the time he got back outside. He yelled at his wife to wake up, but she didn’t move.”

As soon as he was outside, the squealing in his ears stopped. He saw a V-shaped series of very bright, large lights in the night sky. He snapped several photos and trailed the object as it moved slowly away. He stopped as he came to a nearby ridge that overlooked an old graveyard. That’s when he saw a “straight red line,” like a laser, coming out of the object, and shining on one of the gravestones.

Connie’s son, John, described the  object as completely silent, just like the surrounding   landscape. “He was terrified, not so much by the craft as that red beam. He said it reminded him of the lasers that snipers use on their rifles when pinpointing a target in their sights.” He took several photos, but the red beam didn’t show up.

“He told me there was absolute silence there….no typical night noises that are heard in the South….no night birds, no tree frogs, no crickets, no katydids, nothing. Just utter silence, and that spooked him even more because the object was moving slowly across overhead and making NO sound.”

The flying lights took about fifteen minutes to move out of his sight. He went back in the house and fell instantly asleep. His wife hadn’t awakened.

“I have a sense he was abducted…..he IS an abductee…..and had just been returned to his bed when the “squealing” was happening inside his head and he was pulled outside to see the craft.

The next day, Connie’s son went to the cemetery to locate the grave the object had targeted. Here’s the grave. Notice the Masonic symbol in the center of the grave. It’s interesting how the lower part of it resemble the V-shape of the light in the photo.

It should be noted that we sent this photo to Whitley Strieber and from there it was examined by a photo expert, who said he thought it looked like what one might see when a time-lapse photo of the moon is taken with a hand-held camera. Connie notes, though, that the cell phone camera is automatic and the exposure time can’t be changed. She also said that when he first went outside,  he thought he was looking at the glowing full moon until the object moved and the V-shaped lights became noticeable. He also said the moon was visible in another part of the sky.

Interestingly, Maury County, Tennessee has recently been the site of other UFO sightings  and also some other unusual incidents. On Dec. 26, 2012, 17 silent orange orbs floated over the county, according to this report. That report evoked another on from May 16 of this year that reportedly involved a military helicopter and a plane chasing an orb in the county.

Here is what was reported by Michele Hood of Spring Hill, TN.

“We just saw the EXACT same thing in Spring Hill, TN – a military helicopter tailing an orange orb followed by a really, really illuminated military cargo plane coming from the west. The helicopter was booking but couldn’t seem to catch up with the orb. Also, there was a stalled engine sound during the chase – like nothing any of the four adults watching had ever seen. We get a lot of weird sky activity out here in rural Maury County – saw a strange orange orb in the western sky around dusk just last night that stayed stationary, flashed bright.”

We also found a case reported by BBC News in 2009 that sounded eerily similar to John’s experience. The article was headlined…UFO ‘fired laser’ over cemetery,’ and included reference to a high-pitched noise ‘like cats wailing.’ The sub-heading said: “A UFO was seen hovering over a Cheshire cemetery before firing laser beams, according to a police log released by the government. The case dates back to 1996 and was released as part of a 3-year project to release UFO files by the Ministry of Defence and the National Archives.

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So, if we take John’s report at face value that he is telling us what he saw, then the question  is: What is the connection between aliens and the dead? Is there a connection? Ufologists tend to back away from this corner of the UFO phenomena just as ghost hunters typically don’t want to hear about any connection between the dead (i.e. ghosts) and aliens. It’s like two sub-cultures that want to preserve their realms and keep things neat and tidy. Ghosts and graveyards on the one hand, aliens and UFOs, on the other.

But let’s expand the possibilities for a moment and see what connections could exist. Maybe the aliens – or some of them – are not from this dimension. Let’s also say the dead are not dead, but exist in another dimension. Hence, the aliens, who have access to them, don’t see them as dead.

But why would UFOs hang around graveyards? Unfortunately, when the idea of aliens and the dead come together, many people tend to think of darkness, evil, Satanic rites, vampires, zombies, etc….Maybe to the aliens, graveyards are something else altogether. Maybe, because of the human after-life traffic, they are portals between dimensions, an access point to reach our world.

ADDENDUM: Trish and I, along with Connie Cannon, will be interviewed this afternoon by Whitley Streiber on his Dreamland radio show about this case. It will be recorded and we’ll let you know when the show will be broadcast.

UPDATE: We had a very interesting and unusual Dreamland show – our third. Connie was fantastic and carefully explained her son’s experience. We discussed the possible meaning of UFOs and their connection with graveyards. Connie also talked about her father’s unusual death, and we got into Masonic links and numerology. The show will be available next weekend, July 12 or 13.

What was really startling was the ‘sideshow’ going on. First, even before we started, there was an unusual and persistent noise in the studio that Whitley said sounded like a truck. He was baffled because the studio is typically very quiet. Then, during the interview, we were disrupted on a couple of occasions by voices. Whitley would stop and erase the interference, baffled by where it was coming from. When it happened again, he left it in and explained what was happening to listeners. The equipment was in perfect condition, he said. Everything was in order. Yet the glitches continued.

At one point, Trish and I and Connie were talking for several minutes when we realized that Whitley was no longer with us. Oddly, he could hear us and apparently continued recording, but we couldn’t hear him. Again, he said, nothing was wrong with the equipment. We got off the line, he called us back, and we continued without any problems to the end.

Mercury retrograde? Spirit/alien interference? Hm, maybe all of the above.

For the second time this year, Mercury has turned retrograde – in the early degrees of Cancer. This means that before it turns direct again on July 20, it will move back into Gemini.

Mercury, the planet of communication and travel, is often a mischievous little devil, a trickster, particularly when it’s retrograde, which it is three times a year. During these retro periods, the most carefully laid plans develop glitches, snafus are common, miscommunication is the norm, travel can be chaotic, things change without warning. Astrologers knows this as do people who follow astrology or who recognize repeating patterns in their own lives. But it’s not science, it’s not as if you’re going to hear this from your local astronomer or meteorologist.

Since Mercury turned retro on June 26, we’ve had a few glitches here. One of our radio shows was re-scheduled. Our lawn mower went on the fritz. We’ve revamped two books. There was a big snafu with a dog-watching plan.

Our neighbors left for a week and we were supposed to watch their dog during the day – bring Fergie over to our house to play with Noah. At night, one of the neighborhood teens would be staying at their place and tending to Fergie, two cats, a snake, and a few other assorted animals.

But the day after they left, their air conditioning broke down (Merc retro) and it was too hot inside the house for the teen, so he went home. Fergie ended up staying with us 24/7 and our neighbors’ cats lived on their porch. Fergie, an eight-month old German pointer, is  a bundle of energy, time intensive. She needs a task, needs to feel useful, and Noah, now four, tires quickly of the tug-a-war games. And our cats don’t want to play with her. And to top it off, the weather hasn’t cooperated for dog park runs. It’s been raining almost nonstop. That means excessive pent-up energy.

So we kept Fergie for two nights and she woke up Rob at 4:30 this morning ready to play, to romp. A bit early, Ferg.

At any rate, the neighbors’ AC is now  fixed, the lawn mower is fixed, our radio show is scheduled for  July 8. So far, this  Merc retro period has been great for revisions, rewrites, rethinking, re-planning. It’s a good time to slow down, kick back, read, relax, and let the world flow to you, and allow yourself to be swept along, swept up, into this crazy experience we call life.

Happy July 1st. It’s hard to believe that 6 months of 2013 are history.