Since the "professionals" don't give us much help, what's left? Hmmm... how about empirical facts? THAT might even be considered "scientific"?
What facts do we have? (The last 50 posts include quite a few; I have however positive proof that something like this is true.) "Once upon a Time" .....
There was a fellow who had a simple habit, which actually wasn't a terrible thing, and though he did it every day, he probably wasn't really Obsessive-Compulsive. He had this open place on his sink top which was a really good spot to empty his pockets at the end of a day. He always had the same stuff (wallet, watch, keys, Cursillo cross, coins) which he could leave there until re-stuffing pockets the next morning.
One morning he woke up, got his act together, and began to stuff pockets. Whoops! No watch! Where the heck was it? Well here we go --- search the whole sink top. Search the drawers. Search all yesterday's clothes. Multiple times. Search the floor. etc etc. There had been a Doctor's appointment, a lie-down-in-the-grass, a car ride from a friend. It was "obvious", it had just fallen out and gotten lost.
The next morning --- no watch again. What a pain! Let's search it all again. This time the whole wardrobe --- maybe it was a different pair of pants a different shirt. Search the whole sink top again. Nothing nothing nothing. Ugh. Go about the day.
Next morning ... well, hell. Search again. Heart not in it as much this time. No watch. What a pain in the butt.
Fourth day. Going without a watch was getting inconvenient.
Fifth day. Well, there needs to be a decision. Without a watch for five work days.
Made the commitment. Bought the new watch. A simple pocket watch. It'll work.
Next morning. Two watches --- the new and the old. COME ON!!!!! Somewhere in reality someone was laughing really loud (even though I couldn't hear it. --- and yeh, the guy was me if you didn't already know.)
This Trickster event went exactly as I have related it (though not with the "drama" caused by shrinking a week into a few sentences.) I'm uncomfortable placing this experience in front of you. Why? It's really TOO good isn't it? No paranormal event should be this clearly strange. I'm no magnet for weird experiences (other than my UFO sighting, there haven't been many), but this Trickster event occurred exactly as I've described. I don't try to ask "Why me?' but I have to say that this little experience proved to me that there is in fact some "other place."
Another Place?
So, I "know" that things do vanish and reappear. And I have extra reasons to be certain of that, as one of my best friends had a story similar to mine, and one of my sisters is victimized by this phenomenon of the disappearing and returning object often. If you haven't been so blessed, then you can gain confidence by going to one of the internet sites where people tell their tales. Normally I wouldn't put a lot of stock in that, but the numbers of such tales are just about uncountable. Even though I reject 95% of these (I've read several hundred now), there are plenty which seem responsibly reported and not at all told by foolish wannabees.
This phenomenon tells me a few things. Physical objects from this reality can move somewhere else. They don't just become invisible. They aren't "there" at all. I ran my hand through that disappear/appear spot a dozen times --- there was no mass there. This thing (the watch) was gone. Gone where? The mass, the essential quality of matter, left that location and, since it later came back, had persisted in its existence until it returned from "there" back home.
So there is a "There." What is it? That question is still too big. Let's look a little longer at smaller matters.
Small things can go somewhere. Is that a mere cubbyhole in the Universe, or is it something more substantive? Creeping up on that question, we could ask if anything of substantial size ever seems to disappear or mysteriously appear and preferentially both. And ... I'll bet that you have an opinion about that already. But to try to substantiate that bigger claim, I went looking for those larger scale displacements in space. And we can find them. I'm going to toss out a bunch of listings next. Just have the fun of running down through the claims. The list is one I put together from the Paranormal Database (of the UK and Ireland) site.
All of those things are potential candidates for things coming or going to "another place." They are also indicators that such an other place would be of significant size. They indicate in fact that this other space is voluminous enough to swallow cars, buildings, roads, maybe even forests and valleys and mountains. ... maybe even what the Old Irish folks called The Stray Sod.
I tried to do due diligence and comb my own files and the Leprecat for other such anomalies. I wasn't surprised to find a fair number of them. Carl Jung had his own incident. So did Ivan Sanderson. Fellow ufologist Peter Rojcewicz had his case. Diarmuid MacManus investigated three good ones. Ron Quinn told two cases. FATE magazine had four pretty good ones. I stopped logging these at about 80. ... I think that there is enough here to entertain the thought that such a large place might well exist "somewhere." Is it a World Alongside?
Can I add anything to this without the speculations getting embarrassingly far from any data at all? SUMMA FAERYOLOGICA, indeed. Like a minor St. Thomas (very minor) I'm coming down to the gritty core of this, and am faced with the inevitability that I can't get much further.
Is there ANYTHING that the case narratives can add?
I don't want to cut this off today, but I can't think what else to write. It has a feel that there is a little more in these reports though. I'm going off into a Cave for a bit and see if there is anything else to share with you without wasting your time. Till then ....
