Saturday, December 14, 2013

IMPROBABLE POSSIBILITIES TOO


Let's try again....

1965, Clarendon, Australia [near Adelaide]. An orchard keeper went out in the evening to move several sprinklers, carrying with him a poorly-illuminating flashlight. He was about 400 yards away from his house when he was confronted with a dark shadow ahead. He pointed his flashlight at the thing and it appeared to be a clean-edged "beam of blackness" {he said "black light"} about six feet in diameter.

Shining his light up the beam, the sharp edges of the thing continued on up towards an array of eight or nine orange-colored lights, which seemed quite high up, but such judgement was difficult. Though he had been a WWII veteran and didn't scare easily, he said that seeing this thing was the scariest experience of his life.

Hmmm.... too weird for my imagination.


Let's give Adelaide, Australia another chance: in 2000 a man went outside in the late afternoon to clean up his trailer and a tarpaulin which attached to it. He noticed that, unsurprisingly, it had some leaves stuck to it. What WAS surprising was that the leaves were showing a brilliant orange color. Taken aback, he then saw that his hands were radiating the same color.

Looking upwards to try to find a source for this, he found no such radiating object, though the sky was a strange color {ridiculously he doesn't try to describe it} itself. Furthermore, his environment had "gone OZ" on him [my phrase, not his --- i.e. all sound had stopped: no birdsong, not even leaf-rustle].

He dwelt in this state for about a minute before rushing inside to tell his wife. When she came out, however, the world had returned to normal, green leaves and birdsong and ordinary light.

Strange Days in Adelaide.


About the Summer of 2002, witness/claimant on website refused to identify location. Woman was driving home from work just prior to midnight on a very isolated stretch of road {no structures nor lights anywhere about}. Suddenly the area lit up just as if it were daytime BUT THE LIGHT WAS BLUE. She could see all the roadside objects just as if it were normal, except for the color. The phenomenon seemed to extend as far as she could see in all directions. Nothing unusual was in the sky.

Then, as she raced out of there, the light switched off.

Obviously, we need some sort of interview on this. Typical case of the internet probably burying an interesting possibility.


1964, Montrose, IA on the Mississippi roadway. A lady was driving home when she crested a rise in the road [called Galland Hill]. As she topped this rise, "the whole air --- countryside and everything there at the top was a blood red. It looked like the place had been transformed into an inferno with no fire only this terrible red."

The event was localized, and she, extremely frightened, sped away and out of the anomalistic environment. She wrote to NICAP about this; another example of the pitiful fact that people had [and have] no proper place to report such experiences.


2005, Darwin, Australia. Two young women, roommates in a rented flat, were sitting on the floor talking. The windows were opened and quite a cacophony of insect and bird noises was manifest. Their pet cat was also sitting nearby. Then things got well beyond the norm. They felt a prickly sensation at the back of their necks. All external nature sounds stopped {love it when "OZ" happens in OZ}. The cat got agitated, it's hair standing up, just as their own. It began oddly pacing in a circle. Then the room turned completely yellow.

This yellow was "thick".

"I don't know how else to describe it, like you could cut a slice out of it, and an overwhelming heaviness came over the both of us." This "heaviness" seemed physical, and they felt somewhat bowed over with it. This state stuck them into a sort of paralyzed immobility while the cat, however, continued its odd circling. Then a slight movement of air coincided with the heaviness going. Shortly the light disappeared, the hair felt normal, the cat returned to natural behavior. And, they realized that the noises of Nature had returned.

I tell ya, there's mighty weird stuff goin' on in OZ.


1954, Newhaven Harbour, Sussex. Two adults had motored to the harbor to enjoy the view and spend time together. They stopped and she got out to view the ships, while he sat on the carseat with an open door. She turned and informed him that the lower part of his face was yellow. When he confirmed that in the car's mirror, she remarked that his hand was also yellow. Not to be alone in this, he then noticed that one side of her face was also yellow, and she had a circular yellow spot on her coat.

NONE OF THESE PATCHES CHANGED POSITION NOR BRIGHTNESS WHEN THEY MOVED.

As they glanced around, a line of white posts had taken on the same yellow from their base to halfway up their poles. This color was a distinct bright canary yellow shade. The phenomenon lasted a little over a minute, then switched off. While the experience was happening, the environment seemed otherwise unchanged, nor did they feel any other odd physiological effects.

The Sun was shining at the time, but through a dimming misty day. The report went to the Society for Psychical Research, which sort-of dismissed it as a "shared hallucination." Yeh, right.

This thing reminds me somewhat of another claim: 1961, Missoula, MT. It was reported to police authorities that somehow all manner of houses in the town had acquired an overnight appearance of yellow and orange circular patches on their white exteriors. People naturally would suspect meatballism, but the authorities seemed not to think so. On inspection, the patches seemed not to be color-add-ons [by teenage goofs for instance], but rather areas of the original paint discolored.

The "experts" of course tried to BS it away by imaging spontaneous changes in the paint, but with houses painted long ago and at different times, this was just hand-waving. The offending polka-dots cooperated by lasting only a few hours, before fading from their positions and from the experts' memories.


Is there any point to all this? You should decide for yourselves of course, but maybe it is a piece of the bigger puzzle in more ways than one.

My good buddy Jerry Clark was reading a book/article the other day wherein the author [not a student of anomalies] was nevertheless reflecting on "strange experiences." Jerry was struck, favorably, by one paragraph in particular:

***"I've come to the view that there's a place for an approach that dispenses with all the hand-wringing about what it means, and "could it be true?" and the self-conscious "no one's going to make a monkey out of me; I'm not going to have the wool pulled over my eyes no sirree!" pose, but simply accepts that this stuff happens, and now let's move on. The approach is not uncritical --- far from it, it considers obvious problems and challenges --- it just doesn't let itself get overwhelmed by skepticism." ***

Well, hooray for that fellow. That paragraph is, obviously, part of my life, and a foundationstone of this blog. And, about the Universe: it's a pretty big and DEEP place. Some say it runs on Quantum statistical "stuff." Do we really want to think that it can't burp up the occasional seriously odd event? there are probably many unexpected doors "out there."

... and what would happen to Out Proctor if all those doors were closed?

Happy Holidays, and stay safe friends.

10 comments:

  1. Again I wonder, why do I think I've heard of everything, only to learn again that I haven't. This is definitely a new one.

    The only thing it reminds me of is a comment made by an officer at the conclusion of the Civil War battle of Antietam, the bloodiest single-day conflict ever fought on American soil. As he looked out over the carnage, he said it appeared for a moment as if the landscape had turned red. That observation would later give historian Stephen W. Sears the title for his book on the battle, which he called Landscape Turned Red.

    In the present instance we have landscapes turned color under more benign circumstances. Also far more mysterious ones. I can't even imagine an explanation, and I don't mean a prosaic one.

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    1. Hah!,my friend. If the only result of posting my weird atmospheric colors file was to surprise YOU, it was worth it.

      Merry Christmas, Jerry.

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  2. These remind me of a perceptual color shift I used to get whenever I meditated back when I was 12 -13 years old. Everything would turn a brilliant emerald green, as if I were wearing colored glasses. This would last for minutes after opening my eyes - longer than typical afterimages. In any case, the afterimages of looking at light filtered red by eyelids are cyan, not green. I couldn't get any other color than green when I tried. I have no idea what this signifies, it may be akin to synaesthesia, where people consistently see certain letters, numbers, notes and so forth as having certain colors.

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  3. The relationship betwixt time and black body radiation is easily apprehended, but hard to nail down. Probably easier than examining synaesthesia, some things involve frames of reference that are downright questionable.

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  4. i dont know if you would consider this similar to the cases mentioned above (in the post), but when i read your post , this case came up in my mind.. what is it ? is it true ? i dont know..

    http://www.mufon.com/bob_pratt/nunez.html

    On their way home, Carmelo started to drive onto an expressway ramp when a new, olive green pickup truck seemingly came from out of nowhere behind them and passed them, going very fast.Then, just as he drove onto the expressway itself, the truck – and the expressway – disappeared.They found themselves driving in total darkness, unable to see anything.

    The old Chrysler was racing down the middle of a broad avenue lined with big buildings with rectangular windows. The buildings reached higher than they could see and everything was red.The eerie red light was shining from inside the buildings as well as being reflected from something high above them.

    it looked like "one unending building with the red light coming from inside as well as outside. “Everything was red. The avenue was fifty to sixty meters wide and all the buildings started from the road and went upwards completely straight, very tall. We couldn't see the tops of the buildings because everything was reddish up there. The light came from above. It was a reflection and it lighted the whole city. There were no clouds. It was a ceiling, not a sky.", They saw no curbs, no sidewalks, no doors, no cars, hydrants or signs, no people or animals, no trees... nothing but the tall, unending buildings on either side as far as they could see.

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    1. Hard to say if it's the same phenomenon [always assuming that it actually happened of course]. This story combines two different elements seen in files: 1). the unusual lighting situation; and 2). what people are beginning to call "reality slips". The later is the sudden shifting of one's environment to something different than what it should be. This pile of "slip" experiences is a probable jumble which needs sorting out, as it seems to involve a spectrum of "difference" from subtle changes to blunt "alien" surroundings. Your example is far towards the latter. My family's Helen Lane "phantom Hitch-hiker " type experience had very little shift in it. This is for me a rich field for people to begin not only to mass up the piles of cases, but to do some real analysis of them.

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    2. That strange account is very similar to the one Whitley Streiber wrote about in either 'Confirmation' or 'Transformation'. If I'm recalling correctly he was traveling in the tri-state area and took an off-ramp into a very different sort of neighborhood where the architecture of the homes was strange and a serpent motif repeated on several residences....Of course who knows if this was true or made up (I'm still torn on Streiber being completely truthful because he changes his mind so often and doesn't seem to tell the same story twice).

      ~ Susan

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    3. I have no way to assess Whitley Streiber. I know that his early coming-out period was characterized by strong and sometimes hostile emotions, rather than by any real analysis of anything. I was asked to assess the contents of the Communion book, as to whether there was evidence therein. There wasn't any; it was all "believe it or not" with no sorts of supporting interviews nor anything which would expand the credibility base {despite there being plenty of potential for such.} When MUFON published this assessment, Streiber went ballistic. I sort-of didn't blame him [even though my science view of this was legitimate and not biased], he had a lot riding on this thing both in terms of reputation and cash flow from book sales. Only he knows what motivated the ferocity of the outburst.

      I got a possible hint of that from Budd Hopkins. Budd and I were quite close at that time and he and Dave Jacobs both told me that Streiber was the single most frightened person that they had ever encountered. As to whether Streiber believed his own assessment of his story: rather quickly thereafter I caught a TV talk show {might have been Sally Jesse Raphael} wherein he went on at length about his experience being due to Witchcraft rather than Extraterrestrials. If you can unravel this mess, you are much more able than I. I haven't even rejected the hypothesis that these are the horror fiction stream-of-consciousness dreams of an imaginative and hyper-emotional talented horror novel writer. Saying that, I claim nothing.

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  5. Prof, the MUFON assesment you mentioned (about Streiber) , is it available publicly ? or just for internal consumption ?

    i tried to google search it and found nothing (yet)

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    1. This is nothing to get excited about. It's a four-page article in the MUFON Journal of May 1987.

      It came about because of the sensational publicity that Streiber was getting, which, alongside a major dead period in UFO cases, was threatening to so dominate the public and media impressions of UFOs as to be dangerous to the field. At the time, Dennis Stacy was MJ editor and a few other sensible people {Marge Christensen, Tom Deuley for instance]} were prominently involved. They worried {as did CUFOS} that if Streiber turned out to be an embarrassing hoax, AND the mainstream UFO community had made no warning signals whatever [many UFO enthusiasts were praising this as a Salvation of the field], UFOlogy would be even more of a laughingstock than it was.

      Therefore, I was asked literally to read the book and assess it for containment of anything like objective evidence. [or even the potential of it]. This I did. I then created a full page table of Streiber's timeline with alleged interactions listed. I assessed from his words in the book whether there was any corroboration for any of these. I then suggested several alternative hypotheses [some quite flattering] which one could use to cover the book's claims. None of that made any difference to Streiber who was, overtly, quite pissed, and said so.

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