Still Deep Out Proctor: Missed my astral plane.

I'm changing my mind about "not being sure that I believe any of this {recent} stuff". I believe that quite a lot of it HAPPENED but I can't come up with HOW. Oh well, the curse of our interesting hobby persists. .... soldiering on.

Well, THAT was startling, not as startling as it was to our witness though.

1983: Te Ngaere, NZ. A lady was sitting in her living room, presumably enjoying the thunderstorm raging outside [I know that I like them anyway.] BIG BOOM right outside her door. As she stared at the brightening area beneath the door, a flow of light began to enter the room. There had been some metal tools strewn in one area of the floor, and the lightflow became a blob moving to and settling into the middle of the surrounding tools. "Arms" then reached out of the blob and sought out the tools, weaving around them and then retracting back into the blobby mass. Now the "arms" reappeared and extended again. No sound and no odor was apparent. Suddenly the blob retracted its arms again, and took off for the slot beneath the doorway and back outside. The lady didn't regret the egress of her weird visitor.

Of course this seems like some form of lightning --- shall we call it "Blob Lightning?" It's visitation lasted about 15 seconds and so its existence would have been longer than that, maybe much longer. No matter whether we wave off such experiences as "ball lightning" or not, the fact that electrical lightning is composed of particles with the same negative charge means that they all should be repulsing each other and no such balling-up should be happening at all [there are some esoteric theories which try to explain this, but they ARE theories and pretty much debated.] Most "living room type" ball lightning experiences have quite a bit of literal sizzle sound and "ozone odor" to them, so this one was odd in that sense too. Just something natural ---- well, "natural" yes; "just", no.

1976, some town in Hawaii. [sounds like Honolulu, but unstated.]

A husband and wife, he a 20 year military officer, were in their apartment overlooking the harbor. The wife was in the kitchen and he in the living room. Suddenly the condo was filling with a burning smell but no smoke. The wife was screaming: "I'm burning! SOFT burning!"

When the husband ran in, she had ripped off her terrycloth housecoat and was stamping on it. This was a useless act, as it turned out that there was no fire there. The housecoat when inspected smelt of scorching but there was no smoke. The fabric in one place [high on her back] showed a definite scorch mark. The mark did not penetrate the entire thickness of the fabric, although her skin was mildly burned beneath that point at her upper left shoulder.

The wife thought that somehow she must have caught fire from the stove, despite the location of the scorch in such an unlikely place. She felt as if she was "soft burning" and it definitely hurt. The thought of both of them was: could this have been a very mild form of spontaneous human combustion that they had heard about? In the decade or more since the occurrence and the report to SITU, there had never been anything else remotely like this.

One wonders if some action that she forgot got her upper back somehow close to the stove despite the awkwardness in doing so, and this is all we need to explain this. Or did some burning remnant of a neighbors fire drift in their window unnoticed and alight [and a-light] on her back?

Sometime during 1973, Niagara Falls, ONT.

A group of tourists were near Horseshoe Falls enjoying the scene. A short distance away, a parked car with nobody in or around it suddenly turned on its lights. As tourists watched, the headlight lenses then shattered. The horn then began blowing and the engine turned on. Finally the whole car burst into flames and, as a last suicidal gesture to the universe, the windshield exploded. When the fire authorities arrived they said: nothing to see here; just a short circuit.

Uhhhh.... WHAT!?

Well, you can read this one. 1983: Wharncliffe, WV.

A family moves into a Church as All Hell Breaks Loose in their nearby home. "Fire shooting six inches" out of electrical sockets, and fires continuing even after the power is turned off. Fires appear in trash containers, closets, rugs, mattresses, bulletin boards ... the bulletin boards were in the Church after the family moved over.

Just another evening near Proctor, WV.

In 1971, Edwin Robinson of Falmouth, ME was in a serious traffic accident, which left him blind. Fast forwarding to 1980, Edwin Robinson was blessed with another accident --- he got struck by lightning and knocked unconscious. He lay there for awhile and finally regained his senses. They were not the only thing that he regained. Opening his eyes he noticed a change. Shortly his ability to see focussed things returned after the nine year hiatus. One of his first treats was seeing his two granddaughters for the first time. He remarked: Isn't this great!!!?

Yes sir, that it is --- very odd, but great nevertheless.

Another sort of "revitalizing force?"

1935?: Navaho reservation.

A New York physician named Harlow Brooks is visiting the people trying to do what good he can. He sees a young woman with a "generalized" case of tuberculosis on a "relentlessly deteriorative course." Dr. Brooks and the western hospital could do nothing for her. The girl's relatives decided to give up there and go back to their native shaman. The shaman lead the girl on a week long ritual process, which Dr. Brooks observed to have almost killed her. She was removed and taken back to her parents' home. Dr. Brooks ultimately got around to the part of the reservation where she and her family had their home, and she was there, smiling, happy, and seeming in good health. Everything that Dr. Brooks could assess showed him a patient apparently fully cured. {this report was written up in the American Journal of Surgery by Brooks.}

1981: another article, this time in The Journal of the American Medical Association, written by Dr. Richard Kilpatrick, described a female patient, also a Native American, who had a confirmed condition of end-stage kidney disease. As the hospital could do nothing, she returned to the village in which she'd grown up, and the local shaman was consulted. Kilpatrick didn't know what the shaman did, but when saw the lady again, she was suddenly completely cured. His comment in JAMA: "How in the world did a village witch-doctor cure terminal medically intractable nephritis?"

USE THE FORCE, LUKE!

1988: London, UK.

Sir Alfred J. Ayer, age 87, was hospitalized for pneumonia and getting back to health when he choked on his hospital dinner and ... well ... died. He was worked on for four minutes trying to restart his heart. When it did finally regain its lifecycling rhythm, he slowly came to. One of the things that he reported was having a near-death experience.

Some readers will recognize Ayer's name as belonging to one of the world's most outspoken prominent atheists [until the new crop of Dawkins, Hawking, Gould et al came along]. So, an NDE for Ayers was something unexpected, especially by him. ... and it was a bit different.

In his "encounter" Ayers saw a brilliant red light which "confronted" him. It was so bright that it was painful, even when he tried to look away. Ayers had no normal communication, but was somehow convinced that this red light "was responsible for the government of the Universe." He believed that it was communicated to him somehow that the Light had "ministers" and that two of these "creatures" were placed in charge of Time and Space. These creatures, he saw, had bungled their jobs, and Time and Space were badly jumbled.

How did this event affect our leading atheist? He stayed an atheist. But his past convictions were shook up a little. He admitted that his previous conviction that his medical death would "be the end of me" was now weakened, and maybe that will not be the end. Perversely holding onto his lifelong fatalism, though, he added that he hoped that it would still be his end.

Puzzling "philosophy", eh? Too proud to change? Too afraid that something else might be waiting? Something very emotionally strong is going on here for this bright man to fervently hope that his death will be his utter end, and, viewing life in the biggest picture, his existence, fading from all memories, will be finally purposeless. Steven Weinberg, physics Nobelist, was at least intellectually honest enough to recognize that his own fatalistic obliteration meant an ultimately meaninglessness to his individual life. ... and that the whole of human existence had a fundamental tragedy about its course.

Sad. Gentlemen, your philosophy is not for me, but I'll pray for you happily.

Back to the NDE: what can we make of it? It's a "Light" which seemed to be a ruling Entity. But the experience was mixed with odd thoughts as well about the guardians of right-function of time and space --- I haven't noticed much falling apart of Time and Space myself, and I don't think that Science has either. Maybe those "glitches", and "jottles" ... hmmmm.

Nah.

Time to rest my overheated neurons --- no redlight NDE for me tonight.

Back in a couple of days with another bunch of the weird outlier stuff.

Till then, Peace.