2016-12-30

Prepared for a UFO?

It's night, and I wait until Mom and Dad have retired to their bedroom, then I walk around the house turning off all the inside and outside lights. Living at the end of Fairway Drive, we have just a few neighbors to each side of our house. My bedroom window faces the backyard, and beyond our fence the wooded hill we call Mount Baldy, not really big enough to be a mountain. My brother Larry and I climb to the top on occasions when we feel like hiking for hours. The hillside is protected Open Space, although there's a fire road it's blocked off to all vehicles.
I put on a bathing suit and grab a towel. Our upstairs bathroom has a door that opens out to a deck and a stairway down to the backyard with a pool and a cedar hot tub. Mom designed the pool as two hexagons that are slightly offset. It looks pretty cool, but in practice two corners project into the pool, creating a narrow 'waist' that's a bit of a hazard to swimmers. I step into the hot tub, with the temperature set at 103 degrees. Many nights I stay in the tub for more than an hour. Tonight it's clear and there's no moon. It's dark, and there's a good view of the stars. I look up at the sky. Some nights I can see a satellite. My vision is better than average, 30/20. It's 1978, so there aren't too many satellites passing overhead. I like to see if I can spot them just as they rise over the horizon, so I can watch them cross the whole sky.
I soak in the tub for about ten minutes. Then, below the peak of Mount Baldy, I see lights, a horizontal, rectangular array of lights, each of the lights is about the size of the side of a train boxcar. The whole array of lights is 5 lights wide and 5 lights high. Not all the lights are lit at once. They flash on, and off, in a complex pattern, white and yellow and orange, for two seconds, then the lights are gone. From where I sit, at the end of a narrow valley, it looks as though those lights were meant to be seen by me. That bright, silent signal to me conveyed at least two meanings: we're here, and we know you're here.
I'm not quite sure how I feel or what to think about what I just saw. I calmly step out of the tub, wrap my towel, drip my way up the outdoor stairs, and go directly to my roll-top desk and write down every detail, and draw a sketch. I tell nobody.
Seeing the UFO raised the same questions again as my other paranormal experiences: What just happened? What part did I play? What does it mean? Will it happen again? What next? Is it safe to talk to anybody about it?
For more than 30 years I never told anyone about my UFO experience. Eventually I began to share my experience. One of my friends commented, “That sounds like the lights in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” I had seen the movie when it came out in 1977, but I hadn't seen it since then, so I re-watched it. Sure enough, in the scene when the UFO lands at Devils Tower, the rectangular lights look very similar to the array of lights I saw from my backyard in 1978. At that time, I didn't make the connection between my UFO sighting and the scene in Close Encounters. The similarity seems incredible, but Spielberg did his homework. For me the most salient scene in the movie is not when the humans meet the aliens, but when Roy (Richard Dreyfus) is madly piling mashed potatoes on his plate into the shape of Devils Tower, struggling to make sense of his paranormal experience, and Ronnie (Teri Garr) is mortified. My main takeaway the first time I watched Close Encounters was that your family and other people will think you're crazy, even if you're not.
To this day, I risk my reputation, and other people risk theirs, by announcing our interest in the paranormal. Not to mention our beliefs and experiences! The only solution is strength in numbers. Make the Paranormal Normal. Take the Paranormal Pledge. Talk about your paranormal experiences. You'll be quite pleasantly surprised that when you do, many people also share their experiences.
Seven years after my UFO sighting, it's 1985. I'm dropping out of University of California at Davis, smoking weed from a bong named Phil, taking a long-distance hike in the Eldorado National Forest with my girlfriend, getting her pregnant in a tent in the snow, and then working in a tofu shop, when “they” came in disguise.

I work the late-night cleanup shift at Wildwood Tofu in Fairfax, California, among shops, restaurants and a tiny nightclub where greats such as Dylan and members of the Grateful Dead used to show up unannounced to play a set. The tofu kitchen is relatively small; the walls and floor covered entirely in white tile, and filled with commercial-sized kitchen equipment including a massive vat for cooking the soy beans, numerous stainless steel tables, a three-basin sink, and a soymilk bottling station. I work by myself, often starting after midnight. The kitchen is at ground level, with the offices upstairs. The glass entry door and the windows abut the sidewalk. While I hose and scrub the whole place, the glass steams up. One night, a man stops and looks through the window, and he looks so friendly that I open the front door and invite him in. 

2016-12-24

My Unlikely Initiation into the Paranormal

I am sitting in the bleachers at Candlestick Park, watching the San Francisco Giants play baseball. It's 1971, I'm 7 years old, and my brother Larry is 10, he's sitting to my right, and Dad is on my left. We're sitting above third base so we have a pretty good view of San Francisco Bay. The Giants have a winning team including Willie Mays and Willie McCovey. I am not really interested in baseball, and don't know the players names, except McCovey, I only know him because my Uncle Hal is McCovey's attorney, and that's how we got the tickets to the game. At first, I find the baseball game pretty boring. For the moment, everything seems normal to me. The thought occurs to me, “I wonder what would happen if the catcher missed a pitch?” Juan Marichal throws that pitch and sure enough the catcher misses it. That was the last time things seemed normal to me. I had more questions. Why did I have that thought just then? Is it possible to know events before they happen? Would it happen to me again? At that time, I became alert to the possibility that everything might not be exactly as it appears. It did happen again. A couple years later I had another very similar experience at a rollerskating rink during a cakewalk, I knew the number 19 before they called it.
I think that part of the reason that I started having these paranormal experiences is that Dad was successful enough as an Assistant District Attorney that when my little sister Sue was born, he had a three-bedroom, two-story home custom built at the end of Fairway Drive in Novato, and Mom gave me and Larry the chance to choose our own light fixtures for the new house. Mom is the artsy type and fancies herself an interior designer so she took us to a store displaying more than a thousand light fixtures. I chose a plain, round fixture that hung from a cord. Larry chose the same one. Our bedrooms were upstairs, and the master bedroom and baby sister's room were downstairs. Our light switches had dimmers, and I discovered that I could turn down the light almost completely, until the globe was barely visible. When I lay in my bed and gazed up at the barely visible sphere of light, it would seem to fade away. I enjoyed this night after night. At the time I didn't realize that I had stumbled onto a meditation technique.
Many years later, I worked for a company called Tools for Exploration that was the leading seller of “brain machines” including bio-feedback devices, selling “Ganzfeld Goggles,” goggles that present your eyes with a uniform, featureless field of light. This induces a meditative state, or you could say an altered or expanded state of consciousness. At 6 years old, by gazing at my dim round light fixture, I was going into meditation. My gazing meditations must have prepared me for the paranormal experiences to come. And those paranormal experiences prepared me somewhat for the night when a UFO contacted me.





2016-12-20

Nick Nelson tried to make maps of the area within the Oregon Vortex

An excerpt from the Vortex Field Guide:

"As part of the research for his book, Nick Nelson tried to make maps of the area within the Oregon Vortex, but found his efforts to be scrupulously accurate thwarted by the dynamics of the field. He would carefully measure every building and other features like the demo platforms, make drawings of them based on compass readings, and then go home to turn the sketches into a carefully drawn map. The next day with the new map in hand he would check it for accuracy. No matter how careful his measurements and compass readings he never got any of the maps to match the next day’s reality check."

“I would stand in a certain spot, for instance lining up the side of a building with a fence post, and then the fence post with a tree trunk. If all three were in perfect visual alignment I’d take a compass reading, and then mark the spot where my feet were. The next day when standing on the exact same spot and peering down the outer wall of the building the fence post might be out of alignment by a couple of degrees of arc, and worse, the tree truck off this line that used to be straight would be off by an even greater angle. I never really got used to this sort of thing. Always, a violent shiver invariably ran up my spine. The scenery is not supposed to move!”

"Compasses when used inside the vortex to sight objects outside of it work properly, however the compass when used to sight objects inside the vortex are unreliable. A magnetic compass needle may point directly at an object, but in an hour or so will point to one side of that object by a few degrees. This effect is a larger aspect of the dynamics of the area as opposed to a direct malfunction of the compass."

"Close attention shows that a compass inside these areas always points without variance to the same landscape feature outside the line of demarcation. It only diverges from its last reading when used to line up items inside the vortex."

"These two photos were taken at a location in Portland, OR. The camera was hand held, and the photographer tended to focus on the subject rather than holding the camera focused between the two poles, but this small problem cannot explain the extreme distortions between the first photo and the second pole. 

Note; not only did the human being and the poles change heights measurable INSIDE THE PHOTOGRAPH, but the background (principally the school bus) has shifted position from one picture to the other as the subject moved across the line of Demarcation between the poles from left to right. The camera was the same distance from the subject in both shots."

"The only conclusion left is that ...the scenery really does move! That, of course, leaves a few rather thorny questions hanging: What does this say about the nature of the scenery? If the scenery moves, therefore being influenced by what appears to be a very subtle force, what is it made out of? If trees and fence posts can be easily pushed around the yard inside the vortex, what about those same kind of items outside a vortex? What are we made out of?"

2016-12-12

via NASA Goddard: "Seawater is an electrical conductor, and therefore interacts with Earth's magnetic field. As the tides cycle around the ocean basins, the ocean water essentially tries to pull the geomagnetic field lines along. " #whatsavortex VIDEO SOURCE LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaBnNdyH4k4

2016-12-07

How I Came to Be a Paranormal Vortex Detective, by Dan Shaw

The best way for you to understand what a Paranormal Vortex is, is for me to explain how I came to be a Paranormal Vortex Detective. Each of us has experiences in our lives that stand out above all the rest. Experiences that transformed our lives. Those experiences often include be our first sexual experience, marriages, having children, deaths of parents and loved ones, and also conversations with friends and maybe watching TED talks. Every one of us has had experiences in our own lives that transformed how we see the world, and how we live in the world. These transformative experiences I just mentioned are normal experiences, as humans we all go through them. I have never been interested in normal experiences. I began meditating and having psychic experiences at the age of 7, and since then I have been much more interested in paranormal experiences than in normal experiences. A UFO made contact with me when I was 14. When I was 21 a midnight visit from a stranger changed the course of my life forever. These three paranormal events, as I'll explain, transformed my life in unimaginable ways. None of them seems directly related to vortexes, true, but these events set the stage for a series of minor miracles. First a UFO “found” me, then the “stranger” found me, and then, in a similar way, vortexes found me. Vortexes found me, in fact, when I was bottoming out in the days after my separation from my wife and two young children, when I was crying every day. Vortexes lifted me up emotionally, and vortex research gave focus and direction to my life. That was more than 20 years ago, and my children have children, and vortexes still “carry” me today, inspiring me, instilling awe and curiosity and bringing me into contact with many wonderful people, including you.


2016-11-20

black metal sounds like surf rock

i just grokked how much black metal sounds like surf rock
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1edoJH9iGI
&
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QroMYExLprM

2016-11-13

f.lux reduces blue light from devices after dark 4 better sleep

Computer screens, tablets and mobile phones emit full spectrum light around the clock, just like the sun. Exposure to blue light at the wrong time of day can keep you awake later and interfere with the quality of your sleep. f.lux tries to help this by removing blue and green light to help you wind down in the evenings. justgetflux.com/ #gooddesign

A mind that is stretched by a new experience

"A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Story structure

authors: horror author @TheDanWells recommends Star Trek Roleplaying Game Narrator's Guide #storystructure #gooddesign  https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1582369011/vortexmapscom-20

"This place creeps me out."

 #whatsavortex http://vortexmaps.com