Helen Lane...An Encounter Inexplicable

I've resisted telling this encounter because it is not only inexplicable but the mere fact that it happened threatens to discombobulate almost any model of reality one chooses to lean upon. Because of that, I thought that all the previous stuff on the blog was "required" to allow a reader to take this with an open mind. I have several brothers. All of them are great fellows, and all of them are somewhat different. One of them is "grounded" in the real world of work, service, hammers-and-nails, small town orientation, etc. moreso than most people I know. He is not a fool, and is not to be fooled. He goes very slowly to conclusions outside of the normal. His wife enjoys the thought of the unusual much more than he, but she is also an intelligent, substantive woman. I know them very well. There is certainty that the incident that they recounted to me was exactly as they experienced it, to their honest perceptions. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- It was July 1998. My sister-in-law's grandmother was dying and she, my brother, her mother, and other family members had gone to the old home area to be with her in the last days. People were spread out, residing with other extended family members et al, quite a few miles apart. My brother and sister-in-law got a call saying that the time was probably near, and late in the evening (c.11pm) began driving to pick up her mother at another location and then drive to the nursing home. My brother was driving. The trip to the mother's temporary residence was through a relatively non-built-up stretch but which contained suburban structures at intervals and was normally quite well-travelled, even at night. This night there were no cars at all. Out ahead, alongside the road, they could see someone walking dressed in white. As they passed, in a hurry to pick-up the mother to get to the grandmother's location, they saw that this was an older woman in a white nightgown. As they proceeded on down the road, they had a wave of guilt as they felt that this was almost surely an old lady, probably with Alzheimers, who needed help. They picked up the mother and a cousin and retraced their drive down the still empty road. Up ahead again was the old lady. This time they slowed, asked a question, and the "simple" reply indicated that they must take the woman in and try to help her. Her comment to them was: "Oh God bless you. I am trying to get home". She sat in the rear of the car between the mother and the cousin, and was generally "normal", saying that her name was "Helen Lane" and giving an address and phone number. My sister-in-law's family had originally lived in this area [some still did] and they knew enough about the place to find the street address. That did not work out due to there being no numbers on any of the houses, and not wanting to wake up the entirely unlighted neighborhood by trial-and-error. They drove instead to a fire station that the family knew was active at all hours. Still no traffic. The fire station was brightly lit as expected. They knocked at the door--nothing. They circled the building looking in windows and knocking--nothing. This was a major establishment as it served, among other locations, a wealthy area of town. But, feeling a little creepy now, they drove on, for up ahead was a police station that the family knew well. [by the way, they had also somewhere in this sequence tried the phone number and only gotten an irate individual who said he'd never heard of Helen Lane and that they'd woken him up]. The police station that they headed for was run, as Chief of Police, by another of their cousins. They didn't expect him to be there at midnight, of course, but they had confidence that the station would handle the old lady and her problems. [she had said a few "childish" things by now which convinced everyone that they were dealing with Alzheimers]. The police station was there, as it should be, but still with no traffic. It was brightly lit but showing no activity. Through the large front windows, one person could be seen. Greatly relieved, my sister-in-law took Helen Lane up the steps while my brother watched closely. Within there was only this one person. She was a middle-aged woman dressed in civilian clothes. There were no policemen to be seen anywhere. When they came through the door, the woman said "Hello Helen." My sister-in-law told the story, in brief, and the woman said "We know Helen. We'll get her back home". Taking some information on paper, she said not to worry about anything, it would all be taken care of. As I said, my sister-in-law was familiar with this station. It was far too empty. No dispatcher, no desk sergeant, no policemen of any kind. It just felt wrong---but who knows? They let it go and went back to their car and on to the nursing home where the grandmother had just died. The next morning, both my brother and sister-in-law wanted to lay this to rest. They called on the police station and asked. The Chief, their cousin, was in a position to find out. He told them the following: 1). the station had no record of their visit, nor any particulars; 2). there was no record of the existence of any person named "Helen Lane",as far as their files were concerned; 3). the station should have been busy and active with several uniformed officers on duty; 4). no such person as described as being behind the desk has anything to do with the station, nor does anyone know of such an individual being in the station. ---------------------------------------------------------------What are we to make of this? Some people would like to say that this is "just" another instance of the "Phantom Hitchhiker" phenomenon. Well, if it makes anyone feel better to give it a name, then God bless you, but that's hardly very helpful. This case seems to be telling me that my relatives "slipped into" an alternate reality for an hour or so, wherein the circumstances were very close but not identical to our "real world". I have to believe that the details as stated happened--multiple witnesses, including some that I'd trust with my life. If they did, then it SEEMS that they were driving about in a world which was in imitation of ours but not quite identical. As my brother said: "we know the woman in the police station didn't exist." Well, what DID exist? What-the-heck went on here? This experience hardly stands alone. The illustration on the bottom above is meant to picture a roadway encounter in the early 20th century, where after a brief interaction, the man dressed in olde-time clothing just vanished before the witness' eyes. In the UFO literature, cases of this "same-but-not-same" environment crop up now and again. And the mysterious "empty" road is common. I have no good "model" for this reality. I find it difficult to incorporate these displacements or slippages into a coherent way of thinking about anomalies. And there seems to be more than random accident here; more like an "intention". My brother said: "I think it was a test." Maybe, Bro, maybe.----------------------------------------and, I probably shouldn't mention this, but much later my sister-in-law was showing one of her grandkids the location in which this had occurred. You guessed it. The kid noted that it was , and you couldn't see this at night, a graveyard.