Oregon L.O.W.F.I

Archive for the ‘synchronicity’ Category

(Posted at my blog Mothman Flutterings.)

I had the following experience the night of Japan’s earthquake; isn’t directly related to Mothman. Nor am I suggesting it was part of the Mothman energy; and yet, there is a bit of a Mothy vibe to this, and so I’m posting it here. I want to make it clear this winged visitor was not “evil,” or a negative energy in any way. My fearful response to it was due to my own anxieties and fears, not the intent of this bird like entity.

I had an extremely unusual experience the night of Japan’s earthquake which involved a large, swooping-in-on-me bird-like figure, beeping sounds from deep within my head getting louder and louder, and a synchronicity the next day concerning tsunamis and Thunderbirds.

As I posted on both The Orange Orb and Animal Forteana, this is what happened:

I had a very strange experience last night. I spent much of the night sleeping little; listening mainly to Coast to Coast and the news coming in on the earthquake in Japan, and soon after, the tsunami warnings. Earliest reports were warnings for Hawaii and the Washington and Oregon coasts; later, California and Alaska.

I was compelled to listen through the night because of the sheer tragedy and immensity of another overwhelming earth disaster, and also, because we had planned to drive to the coast that day (approximately fifty miles from our home) and spend the weekend there. I was also concerned about my mother and friends on the Oregon coast, as well as family living up and down the Pacific coast. I tried to sleep, managed to doze off for a while but kept waking up, turning the little transistor on again. Throughout Coast to Coast local tsunami warnings came through, announcing beach and school closures for the Oregon coast.

At one point, a deep beeping sound woke me up. This beeping was deep within me; not from an external source, not an acoustic anomaly. It was inside of me. It became louder, and with it, I saw a large dark bird come flying towards me. All I could see was the shape, no details. Slowly flapping its huge wings as it came towards me, as the beeping got louder and louder. A glowing whitish-blue light or “halo” surrounded this bird. This bird vision was indie my head, not external, but it was definitely connected to the beeping sound. At first I thought the bird was an owl; and it might had been, but it seemed to be something else as well. What, I’m not sure. I had conflicting responses to this bird; one, that all this was pretty damn interesting but as the owl, or bird-creature, came closer, along with the light, I became a little scared and tried to shut it out. It sort of exploded when I did that, and I had the feeling this bird-like creature was both frustrated with me and disappointed that I chose to ignore it.

Then, I heard, again from that same, deep-within place inside me, the sounds of voices talking on the radio. So I told myself it was the radio; I still had it on, the ear buds in my ears. But the radio and ear -buds were both on the night table, and the radio was off.

I cannot describe how this was not a dream. It was not a dream that I awoke from, it was not a hypnogognic dream, it was not a dream then I awake to find I’m really still dreaming, … none of that. None of that. I was completely awake. The radio talk within continued; I tried very hard to listen to make sense out of it but the voices were indistinct.

Thunderbird Synchronicity
After I wrote this, I visited The Anomalist to find this link to a post from Loren Coleman at Cryptomundo: Tsunamis and Thunderbirds, which explores the stories of Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest and earthquakes:

It is amazing what Thunderbird folklore may tell us about past tsunamis, says Ruth Ludwin, a University of Washington scientist. Her research has found that Thunderbird and other cryptid stories and traditions “could relate to a large Seattle fault earthquake around A.D. 900 and specific eyewitness accounts linked to a mammoth 1700 earthquake and tsunami in the Cascadia subduction zone.”

“Along the way, I picked up a lot of stories about landslides,” she said. But she couldn’t find anything that seemed to match the 1700 event, until she took a closer look at the story of Thunderbird and Whale.

“It’s a story of the underworld versus the over-world,” Ludwin said.

The Whale was a monster, killing other whales and depriving the people of meat and oil. The Thunderbird, a benevolent supernatural being, saw from its home high in the mountains that the people were starving. The great bird soared out over the coastal waters, then plunged into the ocean and seized the Whale.

A struggle ensued first in the water, the tribal tale says. “The waters receded and rose again. Many canoes came down in trees and were destroyed and numerous lives were lost.”

The Thunderbird eventually succeeds in lifting the evil Whale out of the ocean, carrying it “high into the air (and then) dropping it to the land surface at Beaver prairie. Then at this place there was another great battle.”

On the Coast
After phone calls back and forth and following news reports we decided to drive to the coast, which turned out to be a beautiful drive. The tsunami warnings for this area have been lifted. As I’m typing this I’m looking out at the shore, listening to the ocean.

I described the bird like visitor as possibly an owl, because that was the closet thing I could think of at the time. But it this “bird” or more appropriately, winged creature, had an intelligence about it, an awareness, that transcended mundane animals. (Including us humans.) It was a messenger from another realm, it was spirit.

The wolf is my animal totem.

Local event at the Lane county fairgrounds: Steve Martin’s Wild World of Wolves. I have strong feelings about wild animals in captivity and used for “entertainment” purposes. I don’t know anything about this outfit specifically; I assume the wolves are loved and treated well, but that is not the issue for me. My personal opinions aside, I find the wolf synchronicities lately to be interesting. (The Steve Martins Wild World of Wolves is one feature of Martin’s Working Wildlife of Frazier Park, California, where wild animals of many varieties are trained to work in film, TV, etc.)
An acquaintance on one of my social networking sites posted about a wolf hybrid that attacked his chickens the other night. The following item appeared in today’s Register Guard on-line, even though the article is from December: Biologist’s take: Wolves not as big, bad as thought
I found this juxtaposition an alarming one: a photo of a five year old boy with rifle “prepare [ing] to fire away at the quarry on a video screen at the state Department of Fish and Wildlife’s electronic shooting gallery” and below, a photo of one of the three ‘wild wolves’ at the Boat and Sportsmen’s Show at the Lane County Fairgrounds. (Register Guard, Saturday February 4, 2011.)

“The Owls are not what they seem.” ~ Twin Peaks

And they keep appearing.
On my blogs The Orange Orb, and Animal Forteana, I’ve been posting a lot lately about the many owl synchronicities in my life. From Animal Forteana, the post that seemed to have started it all, from September 12:

The OWL
The owl, as Forteans know, makes its appearance in various ways within UFO-alien abduction-high strangeness events and occult, para-political conspiracy themes. Sometimes the owl appears to a witness of the anomalous as what it is: a bird, but. . . is it? Behind the owl there seems to be something else; an alien, an entity. Is the alien pretending to be an owl, appearing as an owl, or using the owl as familiar? Is the image of the owl projected; beamed to the human, as a tool to lull the human into a hypnotic state?

The owl, as a symbol, appears in conspiracies. The owl is on the dollar bill, and it figures strongly within the Bohemian Grove’s rites; in these contexts, the owl represents hidden knowledge available to the few — and privileged.

In a reversal mode, the owl is also a symbol of high skepticism to the point of ridiculous debunkery. Uber skeptic Joe Nickell has used the owl to “prove” that Mothman, the Kelly Hopkinville entities, and the Flatwoods Monster were simply owls. At least three seperate articles have been written by Nickell, where he details his anyalises of these very different (as to content, time and location) events, yet offers up the same solution: owls.

The television Twin Peaks (created by David Lynch) acknowledged the esoteric imagery of the owl in what is now a cult classic line: “The owls are not what they seem.”

Currently, AMC is airing its new series Rubicon, which is about a spy type think tank. Not exactly CIA, NSA, etc. but a department housed in a funky, run down old building that analyzes and reports on global political doings and individuals. Recent accidental deaths and suicides of Rubicon department heads and power mongers are how the main character, brilliant but naive in many ways, ends up as the new boss of his team. He’s suspicious of the death of his boss, and begins looking into things. Soon, he’s also being messed with. A small figure of an owl, found among the deceased belongings, appeals to and he puts it on his desk. There it sits, as a symbol of the conspiracy (”Who do we work for?” he asks his boss, who is either a mentor, or an enemy — time will tell) swirling around him. Beyond the metaphoric meaning of the owl, this owl also serves a utilitarian purpose: within its base, someone has placed a bug in order to listen in to our hero in his office. The bug is discovered but is left within, later, he checks on it to find it’s gone during a FBI lock down, only to discover the bug has been put back when they leave.

“I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert.” ~ the Bible

September 14: Owls Today
In the movie Encounters of the Fourth Kind, the owl figures prominently, which isn’t surprising, since the movie is about alien abductions. I saw the movie for the first time Saturday night, which inspired me to write the post below on owls, posted Sunday.

Today, I see in the morning paper that the owl appears in the cartoon jumble. At work, someone wearing an over sized T-shirt with a giant owl on it walks by me. I go to my desk to find owl stickers. Later, class divides into teams and decide on team names: one group chooses “the owls.”

Love that owl synchronicity!

Over at the Orange Orb, I continue with my meetings of owl synchronicities:

Thursday, September 16, 2010
Another Owl Synchronicity
Sure enough, in walks a body wearing an oversized tee shirt with a cartoon figure of a human but that’s morphing into an owl — a sort of human/hybrid owl figure. Just a reminder, I guess, :) [Note: a day or two before there were owl stickers on the work table in the room]

Monday, September 20, 2010
More Owls. . .
I ‘ve been posting lately about owl synchronities and imagery in media. The other day I posted about another owl synchronicity: at work, someone came in wearing a large tee-shirt with a large cartoonish human figure that was part owl. Mike Clelland commented that the post was “curiously cryptic,” — I didn’t mean to be esoteric, just noting the weird owl synchronicities in my life lately. Of course, Mike has his own long term synchrocratic relationship with owls!

manipulated owl photograph: photo and image by Regan Lee

And so today found me in a room with a woman wearing large— really large– silver hoops, with some kind of figure inside the hoop. At first I thought they were some kind of flower, or leaf motif, but after awhile, I realized: yes, they were owls! Large silver colored owls, perched upon even larger hoops.

Thursday, September 23, 2010
And . . . more owls
Yes, more owls. Today in a room at work; the large bulletin board had . . . owls. Owl figures all over the place.

All this owl synchronicity — in part, as I wrote earlier (see my owl posts below) it’s messages, signals, signs, along the lines of “they’re noticing you’re noticing them” kind of thing. I put the intent out, as to conscious recall of orange-orb and related encounters, including missing time, and this is what happens. Throw in my affinity and relationship with animals, and we’re off. But on a more mundane level, it’s possible that owls are a new fashionable/trend/fad image in the culture stream; nothing esoteric, although, it is esoteric. The young person wearing a tee shirt with a giant owl on it is just wearing something they think is cool or looks good, but I doubt they’re into esoteric-alien abduction-Illuminati symbolism.

But “they” know. Heh.

“The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea/ In a beautiful pea-green boat,/ They took some honey, and plenty of money,/ Wrapped up in a five-pound note.” ~ Edward Lear

In today’s local paper: the Register-Guard, this announcement appeared:</

Owls are focus of Nearby Nature Quest

A Nearby Nature Quest, “Hooting in the Hollows,” will be held from 10 a.m. to noon Saturday at the Alton Baker Park Host Residence, located between the dog run and community gardens. Learn about owls on a family-paced walk through the woods, meet a costumed Olivia the Owl. Free for Nearby Nature members, $2 per person or $5 per family for non-members. Pre-registration suggested. ***-****

As well as this notice about the Cascades Raptor Center, a wild bird rescue organization ( a beautiful place, with beautiful people who volunteer their time to help injured birds of prey; they do a lot of education in the schools work, etc.) and the new movie Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole.

“An Owl at the Movies”
Cascades Raptor Center will present Dmitri, a Eurasian eagle owl, in conjunction with the film “Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole”

“I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls.” ~ the Bible
At work today, I walk by a display board with an owl on it: something about a contest; I didn’t catch what the contest was about, but I noticed a black and white owl on the display by the text.

(This is my latest Trickster’s Realm column for Tim Binnall’s BoA site.)

An intriguing aspect of alien encounter stories is the shared experience element. There have been many times when I’ve heard a story that, no matter how unusual, how weird, and unbelievable someone’s account may seem, it often turns out that others have had similar, if not the same, kind of experience.

I’ve had UFO experiences going back to childhood, but my sighting of an orange orb in Oregon in the 1980s is, for some reason yet to be discovered, the catalyst for my journey into the world of esoterica, I couldn’t find any references to similar sightings. No books on UFOs or aviation mentioned basket ball sized, glowing from within, seemingly sentient and telepathic orange orbs. Yet I saw one. Furthermore, I experienced missing time the day/night of the sighting. (Other weird events occurred around this sighting as well.)

I’ve seen several UFOs since that sighting, but never anything like that orange orb. Although something odd did happen last year, as I wrote on UFO Magazine’s site:

An Orange Orb Blip

Something slightly odd and startling happened the other day. It was around 5:30 in the afternoon. I was relaxing on the sofa, not asleep but just in that semi-drowsy, pleasant light trance state. I had a short little dream — a dreamlet, you could call it — but I was awake on some level at the same time.

I “dreamt” I had a strong urge to go outside and look at the sky full of stars. (this is something I do almost every evening) and I walk out onto the path to the sidewalk, and scan the dark sky. I hear a voice inside my head, or more like a telepathic nudge, to turn around and look towards the south. I do, and see, very high up, a bright orange light, which is rotating. As far away as it is, and as small as it is — like a large, bright star — I can tell it’s revolving. When I see this orange “star” I’m very scared, and I can feel my stomach drop with cold dread.

I wake up abruptly, feeling very uneasy. With the sighting of the orange object I again am aware of a telepathic message; this one tells me that I know exactly what it is I saw years ago, and to stop playing games. I assume it meant stop playing games with myself, but I had a sense it might have meant with it as well, whatever “it” is.

I’m not sure why I feel it’s important to keep track of episodes like this, but I’m sure one of the many purposes doing this serves is that is simply makes me feel better. No closer to any mystery but I don’t think that’s the point any more. Acknowledging these weird little moments and adding them to the collection of pieces gives the illusion of work, of study. It’s calming somehow. It’s also empowering; once you call it, reclaim the name of something, it’s power diminishes.

And maybe, as has been said by Forteans and esoteric explorers, the Trickster or whatever you want to call it is alerted to our interest and responds. When we start noticing “it,” “it” starts to notice us back.

Every time I come across an account of an orange UFO I get excited and am curious to discover if the sighting was anything like mine so many years ago.

A few years ago, we began to see reports of orange orb or spheres; they’re still coming in. Most of these seem to be the lanterns used in celebrations that have become popular but as many researches have pointed out, this doesn’t explain much. The orange lantern explanation just doesn’t fit a lot of these sightings.

There have been a lot of reports of orange colored lights in the sky; not the floating type lanterns, not the basket ball sized orb I saw, but star like, or like the lights of a plane.

Interesting and sometimes they share some similarities to what I saw but, not the same thing.

Until the “Dark Presence” episode of UFO Hunters. That episode had to do with orange UFOs. Not small, airplane type lights, stars, or lanterns, but like the orb I saw. Some of the orbs witnesses described were green or other colors, but orange seemed to be the main color. I responded to that episode, again on the UFO Magazine blog:

There are many parallels to my orange orb sighting . . . and the ones discussed in the UFO Hunters episode. Many witnesses reported feelings of dread, of fear, though some had experienced feelings of elation, upon seeing these orbs. I had both: feelings of a happy intrigue when I first saw the orb, and a real goofy, almost psychedelic response right after seeing it. . . I also had the most terrifying dreams of my life right after seeing the orb. These dreams were always the same: I’m paralyzed inside a brilliant white beam of light that is so bright I can almost see through things. There is something huge above me, some kind of object. My husband is nearby but has been taken from me and I’m screaming for him, for “them” to return us to. . . or get us out of, wherever the hell we are.

Finally, I had found others who described the same kind of object and events that I experienced, as I wrote:

These orbs were described by witnesses as being basket ball sized, or even larger, like a beach ball. That’s exactly how I’ve been describing the size of the orb I saw for all these years. Witnesses also said they felt a premonition, or some kind of telepathic communication between the orb and themselves; I also had that experience when I first saw the orb. I had glanced up having noticed the orb, which I estimated to be about a mile away. I had the distinct feeling it was waiting for me, and as soon as I thought “What the hell is that thing?” it zoomed right to me, following us along the road. (Witnesses also reported they were followed by the orbs.) As we turned the corner to go home (our house was right around the corner) the orb stopped for a moment above a house across the road from us, then just sank down, “landing” in the backyard. Similar behavior was reported by witnesses on the UFO Hunters episode.

Witnesses also described the orb as being lit from within, or at least giving that appearance. The orb I saw had the same effect; no lights around it, or on it, but it seemed to glow from inside. Witnesses also reported missing time.

Strange to come across so many witnesses with such similar descriptions and so many years apart!

Comments that followed to my piece on UFO Magazine’s blog were interesting. Like this one from “Susan” who saw a large orange orb in 1975, and Raechel from MRIPA (a paranormal investigative group that was featured in the UFO Hunters episode.) Raechel wrote:

Jason and I did do an investigation with Indiana – MUFON back in July of this year. It was a woman and her family who live up in northern Indiana who witnessed one large red orb (basketball size) and a multitude of smaller white orbs (softball size) in the woods that surrounded her house. She too explained a feeling of “awe” at first and than fear. . . . she stated that the orb actually entered through her front door and left a sticky residue on her door. Her dog no longer likes to go out side at night, and when Jason and I were asking her questions, we both noticed that there was missing information that didn’t fit in sequence. When I say this, I do not mean that she was telling us false information, what she was telling us was the truth. Her story to this day still has not altered any. What I’m saying is the way she was talking and her actions fit into that of people that have experienced “missing time.” She couldn’t recall several hours of the 2 nights that she experienced seeing these orbs.

The part about “missing information that didn’t fit…” parallels my own experience. To this day, my husband and I find we disagree, get confused, argue, and misremember parts of that experience. It’s like we have to retrace the same thing every time, and sometimes, new information seems to reveal itself as we try to work through what happened.

This past year I’ve been trying to recall the missing parts of this experience through dreams, meditation, and intent. I don’t know if I’ll ever use hypnosis as a tool but I doubt it very much.

I still don’t know what that orb was, why it was, or what really happened. It is — I don’t know if comforting is quite the word to use — but it is confirming to know that others have also experienced these orbs.
Notes:
UFO Hunters Dark Presence Episode post on UFO Magainze Blog

A couple of items on McMinnville’s UFO conference: here’s something by Deirdre at Interstellar Housewife, and my item at UFOMystic. More to come, including something on the amazing Colin Andrews. So much to process on that!

Bob Welch is a columnist for the Register-Guard, Eugene-Springfield area’s local newspaper. It’s a mainstream column; Welch likes sports a whole lot, and writes about so-called human interest type stories in the area. He isn’t out there at all, (I remember a column he wrote some years ago where he made insipid fun of Bigfoot witnesses, yuck yuck) so it’s that kind of thing.

He had an little moment of synchronicty the other day which inspired him to ask readers to share their interesting odd moments involving synchronicty.(Mysterious, magical or just weird? ) In his recent column Mysterious, eerie events remembered
he shares some of those responses. My favorites: the story about feral cats in Hawaii, and the coach in Harrisburg who had a ghostly encounter with his mother.

Not to pick on Welch (though I’m not a fan particularly) but in another column, as well as a very different kind of column, he writes about a wild game feast in Potluck’s food is, well, a little wild At no point during the article does he address the ethical issues; it’s simply a golly gee kind of piece about, in a surreal juxtaposition, a local country church’s annual game meat fest:

The setting is beautiful, quintessential Americana, a white church steeple rising into the sky amid trees, fields and rolling hills about five miles northwest of Monroe.

The dress is primarily, well, camouflage.

And the décor is what I’d call country fish & game: guns, pelts, poles, antlers, traps, duck decoys and two giant elk mounts, including emcee Scott Ballard’s world-record “8 by 9” Roosevelt elk — eight points on one side of the rack, nine on the other.

After the prayer, we head through the kitchen to go through the potluck line.

The whole scene is bizarre; prayer, camouflage, dead animals on the walls as well as on plates, and the contrast between the country and the gun toting hunters.

Among the food offered: bear, bison, wild cow soup, Nutria, elk, and lemon pepper cougar. And among the door prizes for the event: waterproof Bibles.

My friend and I were at Borders today, and naturally I had to show off Nick Redfern’s new book Contactees: A History of Alien-Human Interaction; since he quotes my article on Dana Howard in the book. So there we are, generally having fun and delighted to find the book on the shelves. My friend insists on taking a picture of me holding the book open to the chapter on Dana Howard. I am not kidding, no more than two seconds after I held the book up, a sales clerk swoops down (she must have come down from the ceiling) and says we can’t take photos due to copyright laws. “No photos of books in any bookstore in the U.S.” she says. My friend said “But she’s the author” (in her excitement she meant I was mentioned in the book, not that I’m the author. I certainly am not!) and the sales clerk snaps “She’s not the author” with great authority. I had to laugh and couldn’t resist; I said “How do you know?” which of course elicited no response from her, as it should. I was being pretty flip. Giddy with my caffeine buzz gone and the crazy crowds of people all day. My friend said, laughing, “No, she’s not, but she’s in it,” which didn’t help matters. I thought we were going to be 86′d out of Borders. The woman walked away but hovered in the next aisle spying on us, like we were two naughty middle schoolers in the school library. We both thought the whole thing was funny; my friend kept whispering “Is she still there? She’s still there!”

The chapter I’m referring to is I AM DIANE… I COME FROM VENUS, about female contactees, including Dana Howard. Diane means “divine” — a being from the heavens, something holy and purer than ourselves from the stars.

My friend, whose name is Stella, (which means Star), turned to me and said “You know my middle name is Diane.” That’s right! I’d forgotten. So there we were, looking at Nick Redfern’s book on Contactees, and a chapter on Diane from the stars, with my friend Stella Diane.