owls and UFO experiencers along a lake in Maine

That small black shape in the tallest tree is an owl

Last weekend I attended a UFO conference in Portland, Maine. Instead of the usual talk of UFOs in the sky and conspiracy theories, the event focused more towards UFO experiencers, the folks who've had the direct contact experience. I was one of the presenters and I gave a one hour long talk on owls, synchronicity and the UFO abductee. This must have resonated with a lot of the attendees because plenty of 'em took me aside and earnestly shared their personal owl experiences. 

After the conference a crew of the speakers and attendees traveled up to a cabin near a lake about an hour's drive north of Portland. The host, Audrey Starborn (a pseudonym), called this a soul family gathering because pretty much everyone in attendance was an experiencer.

A curious thing happened within the first few minutes of my arrival. I was on the grass near an elevated deck off the back of the cabin where a bunch of the guests were standing together. As I stood below them I heard everybody suddenly cry out in a collective exclamation, as if they all said "Wow!" at the exact same time. 

Seconds later, Audrey leaned over the edge of the deck holding a small downy feather. She looked down at me and said, "An owl feather just floated down and landed right between all of us!"

Even though this occurred in full daylight (an odd time for an owl to be in flight) no one saw a bird above them. They described watching the little feather slowly drifting down from high above them coming in from a spot well off to the side of the deck from the direction of the lake, and landing at the feet of a fellow who attended the conference. This was a guy who, the day previously, had sat me down at the conference and rattled off a long list of personal owl experiences, each preceding a set of UFO contact events.

Everyone was buzzing with excitement about this feather landing right at the moment of my arrival, as though the owl spirit announced the entrance of the owl guy. 

 this is a long essay, read more below 
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Later in the day as sunset approached, Suzanne Chancellor took a photo of an owl perched in a tree on a tiny island in the lake, (see image). She was quick to note that it was listed as photo number 1111. This number sequence, often seen on clocks as 11:11, shows up over and over as a sort of sign of mystical grooviness among UFO abductees. Suzanne and her partner Jack excitedly described the how big the owl looked as it flew off from the tree and into the forest surrounding the lake, estimating that it had a five foot wing span. I have heard this same excitement many times when people tell of seeing an owl, these birds can be big and beautiful and people react surprisingly strongly to seeing them.

The site where Suzanne and Jack saw the owl was a small open area right at the edge of the lake. There were a few lawn chairs and some canoes in the grass at this little "beach" which was maybe 50 yards from the cabin along a narrow gravel road through the forest.

This same spot played into another odd event later that night. 

After the sun went down a most of the guests at the cabin were all sitting around a big fire in the lawn near the back deck. It was sometime before midnight when a handful of the folks announced they wanted to "vector in" some sort of craft. In the time leading up to this some of the more psychic attendees would announce things like: They are nearby, I can feel 'em. Everyone in the circle around the fire took part in some intention rituals. This involved visualizing simple things like imagining loving white light enveloping everyone and a genuine request for them to show themselves. 

Some of the folks used the term CE-5 work to describe the techniques used to call in the starships which implies a Close Encounter of the Fifth Kind. These techniques were created by Dr. Steven Greer in the early 90's as a way to foster communication between humans on the ground and Extraterrestrial Intelligence in the sky. In it's simplest form, it's pretty much just setting a strong intention as a group. I have strong opinions on Dr. Steven Greer, but I feel that intention can be a powerful thing, and I am certain it gets results.

After some time spent on this kind of intention setting, most of the folks left the fire and made their way down to the the lake at around midnight. This was the night of a super moon, and there was a low fog on lake and it was glowing with an eerie beauty. It was cold, calm and clear. People at the lakeside begin sharing different manifestation rituals, encouraging the others to join in. I gotta say, this was pretty funny; this was a crew of UFO experiencers and psychics all vying to share their favorite ways to manifest ET grooviness. It was almost, but not quite, a kind of new-age one-upmanship.

Also in attendance was a documentary film crew with a small video camera on a tripod at the lake during this organized call for manifestation. They stayed off at the edge of the crowd and recorded the goings on, but after a while they left the chilly lakeside and went back up to the cabin.

Some of the more psychic folks were pointing up to one defined area in the sky. They were being entirely genuine, but there was a pleading and an urgency that actually made me feel uncomfortable. I am not sure why I felt that way, it was almost like the energy was too keened up, so I eventually left the beach and walked back up to the cabin. I was there for maybe a minute when I heard a collective exclamation from the folks at the lake. I ran back down and everybody told of a bright light "powering up" in the exact spot where the psychic ladies had been pointing.

I spoke to a few different folks who saw the dot of light power up, and they each described the same thing as being similar to the beacon from a light house that slowly turns to face the viewer and flashes at one point and then turns away. 

Also at the cabin that night was one of the presenters from the conference, Disclosure lobbyist Stephen Bassett. He's one of the least “love and light” of anyone within the UFO research community, so he seemed a little out of his element with all the grooviness and feminine energy. He was standing on the lake along with everyone else in the minutes leading up to the flash of light, but like myself, Stephen left the small beach before the flash so he didn't see it either.

The following morning I asked someone why it took so long before the little dot in the sky lit up? Someone said: "I think they were waiting for Stephen Bassett to leave.” (Meeee-yow). That said, they might have been waiting for me to leave.

When I got up on Tuesday morning the first thing I did was make my way to the coffee, a big thermos was set up on the back deck. I saw a woman Carol standing wide eyed on the deck, frantic to tell me about the owl event from the night before. She had been up for a while waiting for me, she described what happened to both her and Pamela.

Both these women were close friends and they had attended the conference as well as the follow up at the cabin. They had both walked back down to the lake at about 1:30 in the morning, well after the sighting of the flash at around midnight. Both of these women are lifelong abductees, they were there on the beach to continue the plea for some sort of sighting. The moon was full and the lake was calm and foggy, so it made for a beautiful setting. They sat in the lawn chairs and talked, and after what seemed like less than an hour, they checked the time only to realize it was now four in the morning! This really freaked them out because it should have been no later than 2:30, so it seems that an hour and a half had vanished. They were both well aware of the missing time and its implications.

Pamela  stated: "NO WAY were we down there that long!"

The night was quite cold, especially down near the water making it a hard place to truly relax. There was a kind of bone chilling dampness should have made the time creep by slowly, not zip by fast.

They walked back up to the cabin and got into the tent they were sharing. As they lay their heads on their pillows, Carol whispered to Pamela , "Before we go to sleep let's ask the owl for a sign if we were, in fact, really visited. Let's ask the owl to hoot for us...."

Within 10 seconds an owl hooted, then it hooted a again, and then a third time. It was quiet for about 20 seconds and then they heard a beautiful set of booming calls as if the owl was directly above the tent. Other folks were camping right there and the hooting was so loud it woke a bunch of them up. Jack was in the next tent over and was jolted awake. He looked at his phone, the time was 4:20 AM. Both Pamela and Carol felt that this owl had totally validated their missing time experience, and there was no doubt that something had happened down by the lake.

Later that morning I sat with several people who had also heard the loud owl hooting, and used my laptop to search out some recorded owl calls. They all agreed it matched the barred owl. Their noisy squawking can sound more like a monkey in the jungle than an owl in the Maine woods.

Jack found this loud owl hooting particularly personal. During the day leading up to this early morning owl event he sensed the presence of his father. I had sat with him while he explained that he felt like he was talking like his father, and even gesturing like him too. When the loud owl call woke him, the time of 4:20 was poignant. April 20th (4/20) was the day of his father's death, and he recognized that right at the moment he looked at his phone. So, the owl echoed both a missing time event as well as death.

This intertwined set of events presented itself to me, and plenty of others, in the guise of an owl. There is even a UFO in this story, but it appeared as nothing more than a flash in the nighttime sky. The missing time event in conjunction with the loud hooting of an owl seems most prescient, but what does it mean? How do I, or any investigator, make sense of this mystical cloud of events? At this point, all I can do is simply document the story, and that's what you are reading here. Beyond that, the mysteries simply hang there at the edge of our lives waiting for some moment to reach out and intersect with reality.

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Kathleen Marden and David Chace

More follow up info from David Chace:

David was a speaker at the conference as well as right there at the location along the lake. This text below was lifted from his facebook comments on the story.

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I think it was just a little after 11 pm, or very close to that time, when we headed down to the beach, and you were kind of leading the way, Mike. After you called for people to follow you, and people actually started following you, I remember you saying, "It's working."

I said "It's working" because I was the first person to make the move and lead the way down to the lake. People had been saying they wanted to go to the lake, but no one got up and started walking. MC.

The film crew left the beach maybe around 12:15 AM. I think there was some issue with their batteries running low, from the conversation I remember hearing from my vantage point, sitting on the edge of the lake. The supposition by some of the people there was that the UFO occupants did not want their craft to be filmed.

While I was sitting there on the beach, I had my arms folded across my chest to keep warm, and I was leaning against my backpack, using it as kind of a pillow, to keep myself awake. The combination of cold and sleepiness made me feel like curling up into a ball and shutting down, but I felt that members of the group were in telepathic communication with a UFO (this many experiencers in one spot is bound to attract something - lol), so the anticipation of possibly seeing something and desire to have my first real UFO sighting kept me down there, though I could have gone up to the house and gone to sleep at any time.

While on the beach, I alternated between opening my eyes, looking at the sky and the lake, and "resting my eyes" (almost dozing off). I was listening to the instructions from the group's leaders as to some of the meditations to do, and state of mind to be in, in order to signal our intention to the craft for peaceful interaction, and I tried to follow along in my own mind.

The main flash from the UFO came at around 12:40 AM (I checked my watch just a few minutes after). Later I heard that there was a smaller (dimmer) flash from the craft maybe 5 to 10 minutes (?) before the main flash, but I don't recall hearing anyone mention it at the time.

The group remained on the beach for perhaps 20 minutes after the main flash, hoping that something else would happen, before Debbie Starborn announced that this portion of the contact was over, or words to that effect, and we headed back up to the lake house around 1 AM.

The CE-5 group was down at the beach for close to two hours (shortly after 11 PM to right around 1 AM). It took patience to witness anything, because the main flash didn't occur until I had been sitting there for about an hour and a half.

I had missed seeing the flash because my eyes were closed at the moment it happened. I remember that we had been focusing on love and the oneness of all things when I heard a chorus of mostly female voices behind me say "Whoa!" in unison. The main emotion conveyed was a sense of awe, tinged with excitement, and with a sense of having been rewarded for our patience, meditations, "thought sequencing" and signaling efforts involving the use of a high-powered flashlight.

Immediately I had a thought, which if I was to express it in words would be, "Darn! I missed it," and I felt left out. At the same time I was thinking my "jealous" state of mind at that moment was not conducive to another sighting, so I attempted to refocus. There was also a feeling of hope and excitement that the UFO might flash again, so I was making an effort to keep my eyes open and directed toward the patch of sky where the sighting had occurred.

As for the description of the flash itself, a "pure white light" that brightened and dimmed again within a period of perhaps half a second to a second is the general description I got from talking to a few of the witnesses. One witness used the analogy of the beacon from a lighthouse sweeping across your field of view. One described it as similar to a flashbulb going off on an old camera. My impression is that it rapidly got brighter, and then rapidly dimmed down again, and it was stationary, occurring at a specific point in the sky. At its brightest it was brighter than any star in the sky. Incidentally, the smaller flash that occurred some minutes before the main flash, from what I understand, took place in a slightly different location, but the same general portion of the sky.

I believe that an "Iridium flare" or glint from a satellite would have had some detectable motion to it, and from the descriptions I've read, those flares or glints usually last a few seconds. Incidentally, I checked the "Heavens Above" website and found that no Iridium flares would have been visible from that location at that time. I believe that we can rule out satellite glint, aircraft, meteors, etc...

As for the sighting of the "owl" over the lake by Suzanne, Jack, and myself earlier that evening, I'm not sure it was an owl. It was a large bird, but was so far off that I don't feel a positive identification was possible. It had been sitting atop a tall tree on the small island before flying off toward a more distant island.

I'll probably revise these comments later and maybe post them as a separate essay after doing some more research, but all that I've said above is as correct as I can make it currently.

If David makes any revisions, I'll include those here. MC

Based on some things, I do feel there may have been a group "abduction" that night after we left the lake and went to bed. The ability of the UFO occupants to operate silently and invisibly is well known. Only follow up with the people who were present will reveal answers.

Incidentally, I think I went to sleep around 2 AM, and woke up from a peaceful sleep around 6 AM. Shortly after 7 AM I went down to the lake for a swim, and remained there until just after 8 AM when I got ready for my ride to the airport.

If I was taken it would have likely been any time during my sleep period, perhaps in the middle of it around 4 AM. However, that is pure speculation, as I don't recall waking with any unusual body marks or anything to make me suspect I was involved in that sense.

I feel kind of bummed that I missed my opportunity to see a flash of light from a UFO, but at the same time, I feel I missed it for a reason. I mean, it seems as if my role is as a researcher, to follow up on things after the fact, rather than as a participant. With each passing year, perhaps I get closer to having my own conscious, unambiguous UFO experience.

Earlier in the day, shortly after I arrived at the lake, I was on the beach talking to Suzanne Chancellor, and was saying how UFOs don't tend to show themselves when I'm around, I guess because it's not my role to experience or participate directly and consciously. She asked why I limit myself, or define myself in that way. I said because that's been my experience (up to that point, anyway). She told me I could change the way I define myself, to allow myself to experience more. It's ironic, in a way, that I managed to just miss seeing the flash from the UFO later that night.

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