an owl and a line of longitude

Due out soon!

I am working to finalize the follow up book about owls. There is one short segment I pulled out during the editing. I thought it was interesting, but it just messed with the flow of the overall chapter. The story deals with a woman Brenda who slept at her sister's house, and that night is filled with odd events. The next day, she saw a huge owl out the back window. This happened in Michigan not far from where I grew up.

Below is the text that's been nixed from the chapter.

What I am sharing next might seem vague, but it feels somehow important to me. I grew up in Southfield Michigan, not too far from where Brenda saw the owl on the back porch. I measured the distance between her sister’s house and my boyhood home at just a little over 17 miles.

I felt a powerful need to check the longitude of both Brenda's sister’s house and the site of my 1974 missing time event, down at the other end of the block from my old house. These longitudinal numbers are noted in degrees, minutes, and seconds. I found the degrees and minutes of longitude matched, but the seconds were off by about quarter of a mile. If you’re not familiar with map jargon, this basically means that these two sites line up almost perfectly north south.

This map stuff was weird for me. I don’t understand why, but something compelled me to check those positions. This wasn’t just an idle curiosity—I was lost for a full day feverishly checking (and re-checking) these coordinates. That Brenda’s owl experience “lines up” on the map with my missing time event as a boy seems significant, but my obsession to look seems like a deeper clue. Again, I can’t help but see myself connected to these other events.

Here’s another tidbit of map weirdness. The line of longitude (in decimal degrees) for my old cabin in Idaho was -111.111, a tidy six ones in a row. Once you get to that third digit to the right of the decimal point, at that latitude each number measures about 200 feet on the earth.

This segment ties into other map weirdness— Byron North Dakota and events in southern Utah.

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Steven Spielberg's E.T. and owls

I watched Steven Spielberg's E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for the second time last night. The only other time I'd seen it was in the theater back in 1982, thirty-five years ago. It was interesting to see it again, especially in light of all the fawning over Stranger Things.

I remember I didn’t really like it much at the time. I was 20 years old, had already dropped out of NYU film school, and my tastes in cinema were more along the lines of John Ford and Michelangelo Antonioni.

But one thing caught my eye, a sequence that involved an owl!

Giant space mushrooms!

That number again.

The Green Man on the tree trunk sighs as the camera passes

Early on in the film, the camera is slowly panning around the drippy wet interior of the UFO. It was a kind of terrarium setting where the little ETs were collecting plant samples. It opens on big mushrooms (did Terence McKenna notice this?) and then it passes by the trunk of a tree with the archetypal face of The Green Man. 

The Green Man shown in this sequence is a sort of puppet, and it moves its lips as if sighing. This happens at exactly the 3:33 time-count.

owls and aliens!

Then there is a cut to the outside and we see a bunch of cuddly ETs wobbling around in the forest in front of the craft. We hear the hooting of a great horned owl and all the little beings stop—it's momentarily silent—then all their heart chakras glow red. This is punctuated by the John Williams music making a little crescendo to highlight the moment.

So we have (at the time) the highest grossing movie in the history of film, with an overt owl and UFO reference.

Plus, there’s an appearance of the Green Man! This is a pre-Christian nature deity associated with the forest. His face made up of leaves and bark, and can be found in medieval churches all across Europe. In Celtic lore he represents the coming of spring, and is often portrayed with acorns.

The Green Man is centered in the frame at 3:33, and the owl hoots seven seconds later. The number 3:33 shows up repeatedly in new-age circles, as well as the UFO abduction lore.

There is another great horned owl hooting later in the film. It can be heard just as ET and Elliott rig up the distress beacon made of toys. This is the communication machine used for, "ET phone home.” The owl shows up (perhaps) to represent The Messenger.

Detail from St. Stephen’s Church in the Welsh town of Old Radnor 

The Green Man from the interior of an English Church
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