SUMMA FAERYOLOGICA, part eleven

The big question that is still sitting there is the one that's almost untouchable: IS there another reality alongside? Do we have any direct evidence? Is there ANYTHING that I can say without sounding like a complete lunatic? 

About 2 weeks ago, I thought that there wasn't much to say. But after a  long meditation, maybe there is. For better or worse, let's begin by asking a few questions.

If there is a world alongside, can we see into it? If we were inside, could we see out? If there is a world alongside, can we walk into it? Can we walk around inside it? Does light work there? Does Gravity? Would we feel generally normal? All of that sounds goofy to be asking, but is it really? We might just have enough hints on some of this stuff after all. 

Diarmuid MacManus & The Stray Sod.

Our hero (MacManus) comes through again.  The first case was from MacManus' minister. He had a visitation to make and set off walking to the place. The walk was able to be shortened quite a bit by crossing a very large field. Though big, it was open and you could see the two large trees near the middle and the rough path leading to the distant exit stile far away. The priest opened the entry gate and started crossing the field as he had done dozens of times before. But when he reached the far side, there was no stile, no path, no cleared area which would allow him to even climb out.

Completely puzzled, he did the obvious: searching all along the hedged area for the missing stile and open patch. Nothing. As he went on he ultimately circumnavigated the entire area: no stile but also no original entry gate either. No matter where he arrived, there was the same impenetrable wall of thick plant staring back at him. He had, as the Irish say, stepped upon the Stray Sod and was trapped within its trickery. An hour or more later, he came to the spot where the exit stile should have been, and there it was.

What should we take from this? Although the field was familiar, and the entry was normal, certain pieces of the area, (the initial entry gate, the joining patch, and the exit stile) were gone. One's best hypothesis would be that this was imitative of the real field in the normal world, but NOT the real field. It could be walked into, but not walked out of until something changed to allow that. The priest also said that when he initially came to the spot where the exit stile should have been and found it changed, he heard a chuckling as if someone far off were laughing at him.

MacManus' second case was that of a young woman who was a housekeeper at a great house but was going to take the long walk back to her family in a nearby village. In order to get to that village, she had to cross over the hill called Lis Ard Fort, known as a "fairy fort" by the locals. She did that, and stood at the summit a while enjoying the view outward towards her own village in the distance. Down the hill she danced until she came to a ditch at the bottom. She headed for a gap in the ditch, but when she arrived she blanked a second and was walking in the precise opposite way. She composed herself and turned and walked to the gap. The same thing happened again. It kept happening. Frightened now, she searched along the ditch, always coming up against some "barrier" which refused to let her pass. This happened for hours. She began feeling a sense of hostility radiating toward her from the Fairy Fort.

Feeling hopeless, hours went by. People from the village got concerned and sent out parties. She saw the lanterns coming. She was standing shouting waving, but they showed no sign of seeing her, even though they passed within twenty yards. Finally hours more gone by, she realized that the barrier was gone, and scrambled quickly out and went to her village and family. This case is almost identical to the first with one added piece of information. She could walk in and ultimately walk out. Light, gravity, and other forces seemed to be normal. Time passed normally. The area was as she knew it. The "addition" to reality was the barrier; and the addition to our understanding was that she could see out of the Stray Sod though others could not see in.

MacManus' third case was one in which a man left a party at one house of an estate to go across a large field to another house for the evening. It was past midnight, and the walk began as usual, but very quickly the entirety of the environment changed. He was immediately aware that he was no longer in the familiar field. He as a good Irishman suspected fairy involvement, so he employed the old legend idea of turning his coat inside out. It didn't work. Nothing changed and he couldn't find any sign of a way out. He walked around and worried himself into a nervous sweat. Finally hours later, a glimpse of a way out occurred, and he hurried on. The opening was in the direction of the first house, so he took the opportunity and straggled back there, showing up at the door "in a state."

Again, walk in, walk around, environment changed but not changing the way things like light and gravity work. Could not see out until the very last moment. Time operated normally. This one seemed clearly like a separate Stray Sod bubble out of touch with the normal world. None of MacManus' three cases were of very large places-alongside, even though the priest's field was a very large multi-acre area.

So, MacManus, as usual, helps. What else do we have? 

We have Ron Quinn's three cases for starters. In two of those cases the witnesses were presented with mists, small islands and bridges to get there. In both of those cases they walked across the bridges out of curiosity and voluntarily. The island acreages were similar to the fields in the Irish cases, but within both islands the witnesses saw faery folk (with whom they did not interact.) The witnesses could also see our normal world from the fairy island shore. Light, gravity, and the forces seemed normal. Time passage was also normal. The third case was an entry (again entered voluntarily in the sense of accidental) but this experience included significant change of visual atmosphere once crossing over. The crossing was into a similar physical environment (mountainous) but distinct from the normal. The main addition to our understanding here was that this environment alongside was a very great terrain --- no small field nor island.

In the fairy census there is a good narrative about a hiker pushing aside some forest bushes and noticing a different type of forested area beyond, which was explored for some time, and found very large just as a mountain area should be. Again no time rate issues.

The Trickster phenomenon indicates that transaction of objects out of our normal space to another may even be common. The few faery-world witness cases seem to show that these thousands of small object translocations do not have to disappear into tiny cubbyholes of almost dislocated spacetime, but might have a whole other world into which they migrate. But this is, without need to say it, pretty speculative without more cases of witnesses "going" into there, walking about, and coming back to tell us about it.

There are a fair number of encounters wherein the experience is of a house or even a village out of place which, later, cannot be re-found. I have a list of maybe two or three dozen of these. I'm tired though ... and I don't feel like making ANOTHER lengthy study of a separately defined anomaly, and so, as I know that you know these things already, I'll just leave it as a claim: there are lots of reports of things like cottages et al (even visited inside) which later can not be documented as existing.

But, I am going to revisit one special case ... Helen Lane.

I'm going to repeat my telling of 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.

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, teaching, service, hammers-and-nails, small town orientation, etc. more so 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, some 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 traveled, even at night. (My sister-in-law grew up in this exact area.)

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 Alzheimer's, 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 Alzheimer's]. 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 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.

This event, which I heard about from my family long before any study of Faery and Stray Sod, seems incredibly useful to me in understanding some bits of our current inquiries. My family members seamlessly drove into a reality of which they recognized nearly every aspect. Other than the emptiness of the usually busy road, everything was so much as it should be that there was no thought of something strange going on. Light worked; Gravity worked; the car engine worked; everything still worked. BUT it still was not our reality. Somehow a near perfect matching of familiar reality was in place, but my family and their car were not in our space. Their experience doesn't seem much like being in Faery, but if "someone" wanted it to be, then ... how much more would they really need to add? (By the way, the rate of Time seemed normal here too.)

I know that you cannot buy the Helen Lane mystery with the assurance that I can. Maybe the MacManus and Quinn and Fairy Census and all the other displacement tales can fill in that credibility gap. I hope so. Because for me, the Helen Lane event broke the barriers of stubborn skepticism. Also, it about exhausts what I can usefully say to you about all this "other dimensional" stuff. I could utter pseudo-scientific vagueness about the Quantum Front of the Universe-to-come surging into the Uncollapsed Sea-of-Indeterminism (Ouch!) and the possibility of more or less Likely universes being "crystallized" (our own but also slightly less endowed realities) or twin universes with variable particle spins, which only become interactive via exotic force situations in boundary interfaces, or Block theories of Time and re-running of fixed matter relationships a la filmstrips, etc etc until we all went completely insane or at least went out for a drink.
 
But I'm not falling for that. The truth, if ever we find it, resides in only one area: The Case Reports, The Actual Experiences of Real People. Never drift too far from that. Anyone can dream up neat sounding BS.

I have been blessed with just the happy amount of great anomalistic experiences. A good UFO close encounter (which is irrelevant here since advanced aero-tech is part of normal universal behavior), a great Trickster (my watch) translocation, and Helen Lane (plus poltergeists et al) from my family. Helen Lane and the translocation(s) pretty much end discussion for me regarding the existence of another space-time. The translocations and the Trickster pretty much end discussion for me that at least some of these experiences are "intentional" and not by us.

NAUGHTY?

or NICE?

I think that I'm done now. Maybe for a long time. Whether anything more gets published in this blog is unknown to me, as other work (a review chapter on CE2 electromagnetic effects, plus a possible piece for Simon Young, plus a book maybe) encroaches, which work has been long put off. If anyone has a particular request, and I think that i have anything worth saying, maybe that will move me to resuscitate this enterprise again.

As I leave, you might be interested in one of the wilder "World Alongside" claims published and updated earlier on this blog. Way back in 2009 I did an entry called The Man Who Found a Door in the World --- it was from a letter and packet of geological information sent to Dr. Hynek. Later in 2015, I received a little more information on the case and published a second blog entry titled Are There Doors in the World? It at the very least is fun. "Search it" on the blog and have a good read.

Blessings to all of you, and stay close to the "data" (the reports) on your quests --- they will inoculate you against the tiny minded reductionists whose words blow hot against the Soul. As to that: someone told me once that my name could be scrambled to become Charles Wisdom. I thought that was pretty inappropriate and over-inflated (picture pun on this shortly). So I tried one for myself. My spelling wasn't as good but I got Wilde Shamrocs. For this time-displaced Irish Catholic Boy, that felt just about right. The two persona then had a conversation with our cousin, the West Virginian philosopher, Mountain William.

CW: My dear WS, don't you think that you're a bit rough on the academics?
WS: Perhaps, some of them are OK. But others ....
MW: Seems to me that most of them are like fancy cars with four flat tires.
WS: Yeh. They could use a little Fresh Air to get them moving.
CW: But what if you're just full of Hot Air yourself?
WS: That might not be so bad.

Sail On, Friends