Jenny Randles is a talented UFOlogist. Taking all aspects of that into consideration, she is perhaps the best that Britain has produced. She has had many interesting thoughts during her long career, and the one that will probably live longest is "The OZ Factor". This is a concept that affords itself of varying interpretations, but every one that I've read seems to include some sort of feeling by the witness of being in a similar physical environment to that expected but one in which something, perhaps physically obvious, perhaps sensorily felt, is "not as it should be". This element of uncanny different-ness appears in many more reports than one would suspect, and in many non-UFOlogical incidents as well. But this is a "UFO post day", so today we will search for OZ in UFO experiences.-----------------------------------------------------------------John Timmerman was one of the best UFOlogists ever at getting people to talk to him and unburden themselves of their experiences, holding nothing back. John was and is one of the friendliest and non-judgemental people and the witnesses sensed that and that they would not be laughed at. John therefore got about 800 or so people over the years to have tape-recording sessions, wherein they repeated their "high strangeness" encounters for anyone to hear. A few of these well illustrate OZ, and I'll give you a thumbnail sketch of them now. A). January 1988: Benton, Louisiana. A father and daughter were driving over to the mother's place-of-work to pick her up. They stopped in the parking lot a little early. Over the nearby interstate came a flash of light which entered the lot and revealed itself to be a metallic disk with something like "scoops" all along the bottom perimeter. At this, the environment changed. "This machine sat there and looked at us, and we looked at it, and I guess it must have been a good minute and a half. And it seemed at this time there were no cars moving, didn't hear a thing in the world. Nothing. Just like the world stood still--it just seemed like I was in a trance...like there was nothing else in the world but us and the machine. As soon as the machine left, traffic on I-20 came alive and the parking lot became active".---------------------------------------------------------B). September 1974: Sterling, Illinois. Three people were standing on their farm at about 9pm, when the tops of their silos lit up. Suddenly the light source moved directly over them and the whole environment got absolutely silent. The light was abnormal. "I don't think that any of us moved, but I can remember looking at my husband and the other man and it was like you could see not exactly through them but...it was kind of bluish white, and you could almost see like not really their bones but the framework of the bones, because it was darker than the rest of their body was...I remember just standing there thinking 'this is weird. Look. I can almost see through them'." The odd light then doubled its "oddness" by drawing gradually up into whatever was its source "like an elevator". When the whatever-it-was left, the environment returned to normal.---------------------------------------------------------C). July or August 1975: Pittsburg, Kansas. A married couple was driving in the evening [9pm], when they spotted a "falling star". That "star" however turned in its trajectory and flew over them and continued just ahead of them above the highway. The object had several very bright "panels", the light from which obscured the shape of the thing itself. All during this "pacing" experience, the environment changed to one of "completely dead silence". More oddly still, when the wife would say something to her husband, the object would do something "coincidentally" related to the comment. Then, it just "blinked" out of existence at least as far as they could tell. Perhaps just another coincidence, but the rest of the way home they were treated to a dense parade of wildlife [skunk, possum, raccoons, dogs, cats, rabbits] all on the go as if they were exceptionally excited. At home their dog and the neighbor's geese were acting similarly nuts. -----------------------------------------------There are also several cases where the witnesses have a mild UFO encounter and it involves driving along a road which is same-but-not-same. Witnesses may be expecting some building [example a store or gasoline station] or even a small village, and "miss" it, despite that being, in their opinion, impossible. So, what's this all about? Do we have near-twin worlds which occasionally slip into one another? Or are these experiences rigged for us by "someone" with a lot of power of some kind, physical or psychic? Please explain all this to me at your earliest convenience.
