hyper-vivid distorted consciousness

Hyper-vivid memory from 1993

In January or February of 1993 I awoke from a sound sleep and looked out my bedroom window to see five spindly gray aliens walking towards my house. This sighting lasted, maybe, less than 20 seconds.

This happened over twenty years ago. Since then I’ve written about this, drawn pictures and wrestled with the implications. I did a long post where I tried to honestly express the strangeness this memory. At the core of this experience was a very real change in normal perceptions, a kind of distorted consciousness. I try to describe this odd feeling in detail when I initially wrote about the overall experience (linked HERE).

It felt dreamlike, but it was different than any other dream I’ve ever had. Here is an excerpt of what I wrote:

This memory is strangely vivid in a way that seems entirely different form a normal state of mind... weirdly quiet - sort of a pressurized fish bowl - the deepest part of my psyche is displaced and moved to the forefront - the normal thought chatter in my head is turned off - maybe - kinda - sorta...

A distinct warping of my psyche, whatever that means... because this strangely vivid state of mind was so weird, I do not fully trust this memory.

This distorted feeling has a flavor that is absolutely distinct. Attempting to describe it in words would only hint at the sensations. All I can say is that what I felt was unmistakably unique. I have made a very real effort to ask other UFO abductees if they have ever experienced this altered state of consciousness. I've had conversations where we describe what I feel is the same exact distorted sensation.

I’ve had three other experiences that seem to indicate to me that what happened in 1993 wasn’t a dream.

One event took place in January of 2001. Again, I had this exact same feeling while waking up under extremely bizarre circumstances. The story is complex and it was written up a long and detailed post (linked HERE).

A funny dream with a little UFO

Another example took place in the summer of 2008, the same feeling manifested itself within a dream. This is actually a funny little story and it fits neatly into a little subcategory I’ve been calling my reassuring dreams. I went through a phase where I would have very vivid dreams where a lesson or example would be conveyed within the dream narrative.

This dream has me interacting with a small flying saucer and as I moved closer I could feel the sensation of the oddly distorted reality. I could control it by moving in close and backing away. Again, this feeling was exactly the same as what I experienced in 1993. I posted and illustrated my memories (linked HERE).

a hyper-vivid experience inside a tent near Dolores Colorado

Finally, I felt this sensation again while floating up out of the tent during an event in 2010. Of all my odd experiences this one seems to scream UFO abduction. I wrote about this (and all it’s associated synchro-weirdness) in a series of posts with illustrations (linked HERE).

So, I’ve had four very distinct experiences with this odd sensation, each connected to something very strange. After the event seeing the aliens out my window in 1993 I just dismissed the whole thing as nothing more than a weird dream. It did feel dreamlike and denying the implications seems understandable given my life at that point. But since then I’ve had three other experiences where I felt that same distinctive feeling making that outright denial almost impossible.

At this point, 20 years later, I’m at a point where I must conclude that the event in 1993 really happened and it wasn’t just a dream. I say this not because of my very clear memories of that night, but because of the follow up experiences.

This has been a pattern for me. I will deny the implications of a defining event, but later come to accept it’s reality because of a series of intertwined experiences. These seem to come in the form of synchronicities, psychic flashes, vivid dreams, lines on maps or owl interactions. My sense is that the universe is showing me something, and if I don’t acknowledge the significance there is a follow up bunch of weird experiences that force me to reexamine the deeper meaning.

(a little bit more)

I have never written about this one tiny aspect of the 1993 event because it was so hard to justify. The way I initially explained the distorted feeling came almost as a reflexive response. Here’s what I told myself:

You know that feeling when you are a little kid driving in the car with your parents and you fall asleep and then wake up where you didn’t expect to be? That’s what this felt like.

That description seems to feel close. I am picturing myself as a little boy falling asleep with my forehead against the car window while on a long drive with my parents. The steady droning of the car will induce a sort of vivid dream-state where I could visualize looking out the window at the passing scenery, but if I opened my eyes the view wouldn’t match what I was dreaming. Now, this might easily reinforce that it was nothing more than a dream. But, the more mysterious implication is that waking up in a car where you don’t expect to be has the distinct flavor of a missing time event.

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audio interview with Dr. Janet Elizabeth Colli

In June of 2011 I had the honor to sit in as the guest host for Whitley Strieber's on-line subscribers and interview Dr. Janet Elizabeth Colli. I had done my own interview with Dr. Colli just a month earlier. During the follow up interview we focus on one single issue, the event in the tent with Natascha from 2010. This all ties back into the yellow line on the map of southern Utah, the tent experience was the Eastern most of the three points on that line.

This conversation seems a little bit like a client and a therapist, where I ask for help and she shares her insights.

one-click audio download HERE

Thanks to Whitley for letting me post this 30-minute interview here on my site. His site is Unknown Country.

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I now know

Anyone who's followed my stuff, whether written or spoken, will know that I can drone on and on about the existential angst of not knowing. This has been a kind of mantra, the endless tape loop I repeat that I am NOT sure if I am really and truly an alien abductee.

I feel like I've been in a place of actually knowing for a while now (maybe years) but my incessant "maybe" had become a habit. Or maybe a role I was playing.

Well, this last event (March 10th) pretty much changed all that. It wasn't the night under the stars, it was the follow up weirdness with the map. The precision of that yellow line and how it exactly connected three very telling events, including one with a hooting owl, was just too revealing. It simply screamed at me, this shit is real!

I am now unable to cling to that former identity of "not" knowing. I now know. I am directly intertwined with the UFO reality.

I hate the term abductee and all it's baggage. That title is way too simplistic, but that's probably the best term to define what's been going on with my life. That said, I am convinced that at the source of this mystery there is something far more complex and far more bizarre than we dare imagine. The inadequate words abductee, experiencer and contactee all seem flat in the face of this elaborate puzzle.

But the knowing remains.

peace,
Mike Clelland

March 22 2013

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"I no longer have the luxury of disbelief." 

This is a quote from my friend Peter Robbins. This statement comes after his time working closely along side Budd Hopkins and his clients.

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To fully understand this post, you'll need to read the two previous postings (linked below):

1. the night under the stars 

2. the map 

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line on a map across Southern Utah

GREEN Pin: Location of the round structure, 3-10-2013

RED Pin: Owl and orb seen by Natascha, 3-2-2011

BLUE Pin: Irrational fear with Natascha, 5-13-2010
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Note: The info here is a companion to another post about sleeping under the stars (linked HERE). This is required reading to fully understand the overal implications.

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I'm sorta freaked out. I just created this map. I did it in a sort of crazed intuitive flurry. Before I even started I absolutely knew what would appear. The yellow line connects three deeply personal sights in Southern Utah. This is entangled with the post I wrote this morning.

The GREEN pin marks the location of a round structure seen from my sleeping bag just two nights ago. (post linked HERE)

The RED pin marks the site where Natascha and I slept along the Burr Trail. That night she took a walk in the moonlight while I stayed in my sleeping bag. She saw a bright orb while I listened to the hooting of a Great Horned Owl. (post linked HERE)

The BLUE pin is what is pretty much the most profound abduction type experience I have ever (consciously) experienced. Natasha and I experienced an irrational sense of fear in a tent near Dolores Colorado. (post linked HERE) That same night I felt as if I was floating out of the roof of the tent and into a white realm. I asked, "Am I on a table?" and the next day I had a long scratch across my chest.

These three locations are each EXACTLY positioned along a 231 mile long straight line. The message to me is that something happened on Sunday night under the stars. Needless to say, this is some freaky shit!

The RED pin marks where I slept the night I heard the owl and Natascha saw the bright orb. 

That pin is exactly where we were lying. 

The yellow line cuts thru it (seemingly) to the millimeter!

The weird impulse to create this map:
About an hour ago I experienced a very clear knowing that these locations would line up perfectly. It didn't come in a clear verbal set of instructions. Instead, I was just suddenly aware of the full image, and how it looked (and all fit together) in one instant of absolute knowing. I just sat at the computer, opened google maps and did it. At first it was a little off. I was using my sleeping location from two nights ago as the western most point. The location of the orb and owl event in the middle was about 200 feet off from perfect. Then I switched the western most point about 1.6 miles to the site of the circular structure and everything lined up with an eerie exact perfection.

I am reliving the same weird sense of profound knowing from 2010. This involved putting lines on a map and it culminated in a series of posts linked HERE.

This sense of absolute knowing can only be called a very clear psychic download.
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Text added March 15th 2013:
Last night I got a note from Natascha. She told me March 10th is her birthday! This is the date of the Sunday night event when I was in sleeping outside in Utah. She was with me and experienced the middle and Eastern events on the map. These were by far the scarier than what happened last Sunday.

(and)

On March 10th 2010 I posted the very first essay where I posted an essay titled a LINE ON A MAP. This dealt with the map weirdness that connected Mac Tonnies, Byron North Dakota and owls. This was exactly three years to the day before I lay down under the starts in Utah on Sunday night.


Text added March 23 2013:
Some more very strange data about these three sites on the map. A commenter named Anonymous checked the moon phases for the three events noted on the yellow line. Each event occurred extremely close to the new moon on the calendar for that day. The new moon is the exact opposite of the full moon, when the moon is at it's darkest.

The data he uncovered is noted below. He used a site called WolfrAmalpha to get the data around new moons and the calendar. I did a quick check using other on-line sources and his numbers are accurate.

nearest new moon to March 10th 2013 in Utah: 1:54 pm MDT March 11th 2013 (approx.12 hours after the event)

nearest new moon to March 2nd 2011 in Utah: 1:49 pm MST March 4th 2011 (approx. 58 hours after the event)

nearest new moon to May 13th 2010 in Colorado: 7:07 pm MST May 13th 2010 (approx. 4.5 hours before the event)

The March 10th 2013 event happened sometime after midnight and before 4:AM, there's no way of knowing. The March 2nd 2011event happened sometime before dawn. Maybe around 4:AM or so, again, no way of knowing. May 13th 2010 event happened around 11:40 PM, I remember looking at my watch and wrote it down the following morning.

The probability of three events happening so close to the new moon obviously very low. Also, the pattern of seeing a UFO during the new moon was noted by John Keel in The Mothman Prophesies. 

Huge thanks to Anonymous!
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Also:
Here's my response to this map. Something changed in me and I write about it HERE.
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sleeping out under the stars in Southern Utah

What I saw throughout the night from where I slept

What I am sharing here might be nothing, but I have made a pledge to post anything odd on this blog, so here goes.

I've just returned to my home after two weeks away. I spent most of that time at a UFO conference near Phoenix and then visiting friends in Sedona and Flagstaff.

When I drive around the west I try to sleep out under the stars and avoid getting a hotel room. This is what I did on Sunday night (the night of March 10th thru the morning of the 11th).

I slept along side Utah Highway 20 just a few miles away from I-15. It is noted as Buckskin Road on google maps. I pulled into the spot around 9:PM and walked around a little bit with a headlamp to stretch my legs. The area had low bushy trees (Junipers I think) and there was a series of beaten down roads and little turn outs. Typical of this part of the west there was some litter and evidence of campfires. Plenty of people had been here before. This was a cold Sunday night so I wasn’t really worried about anyone else pulling in. This was a perfect spot to sleep out. I set my sleeping pad down in the dirt near my little Subaru. I climbed into my sleeping bag and went to sleep.

At some point during the night I woke up. I suspect it was around mid-night. The stars were amazing and I was enjoying looking up at the clear sky. I looked at the ridge-line of rounded peaks to the south and saw what appeared to be a large round structure perched on top of a hill. My impression was that I was looking at a round house with a row of lights situated along the outer circumference of the building. It seemed like a big round fancy home.

Google map image looking South, the arrow shows the approximate location of the structure. 
The gray line is Buckskin Road.

Right in that moment I pondered if this was a landed flying saucer. Really, I literally tried to take in what I was seeing and question the mood of what I felt deep inside myself. It seemed perfectly terrestrial. There was nothing at all other worldly about it. There was no feeling of anything at all being odd. I said to myself, if this was a flying saucer, I would sense something weird. But everything seemed fine. The lights were partially obscured by the trees but they seemed normal. I rolled over and went back to sleep.

I woke up again a little while later.

This time I saw a bright light on the ground near where I was sleeping, it was west of where I was lying on the ground. My impression was that it was just a car parked nearby and I was seeing a light. I sat up and tried to peer thru the low bushy trees. The light was mostly obscured and I moved my head from side to side in the hopes of getting a better view. I couldn’t see much but it seemed like nothing unusual. My impression was that someone pulled in while I was asleep and parked a short distance away. I am assuming that they were doing just what I was doing, sleeping in a pretty spot while doing a long drive.

I looked back up to the round structure on the hillside above me and nothing had changed. It still looked the same and the same neutral feeling.

I went back to sleep and woke sometime later. The light thru the bushes was now off and the circular round structure was pretty much the same. This time I noted a new light that appeared to be on the ground and just a little bit off to the left of the structure (see top image). It appeared to be a kind of yard lamp next to the big round home.

I think it was at this point that I felt pretty well rested and I got up. I tossed everything in the car and started driving again. If I remember correctly it was a little bit before 4:AM. This gets a little confusing because the switchover to daylights savings time would have been the night before and I hadn’t changed the clock in my car yet. So it might have been a little bit before 5:AM. I enjoy driving that early when the traffic is minimal.

I remember nothing at all unusual about that night, I slept well despite waking a few times. I feel like I got close to seven hours of sleep and I awoke feeling well rested.

overview showing the sleep site (multi-pins) and the structure site (green pin)

When I got home I felt the need to look at google maps to see an image of that round structure on the hill top. I feel strongly that I picked out where the round structure should have been. I found the exact location of my sleeping spot, but the weird thing is that I couldn’t find anything on the satellite image that would match the circular building. The structure with the lights was approximately 1.6 miles away from where I slept.

I checked the date of the satellite imagery on the google earth and it read 9/14/2011. Perhaps there has been some sort of a structure built since then and it simply isn’t available on the maps yet. Maybe I’ll see something when the satellite imagery gets updated.

It may not have been a house, it might have been an array of cell towers (or something similar) arranged in a circle. It might have been a round water tank, but it is highly unlikely it would be at that location or lit with lights. The ring of lights around the structure weren’t quite perfectly positioned, they seemed to be spaced a little bit irregular and slight up or down. The seemed to be windows and that's why I say it was a house. The top illustration shows a ring of bright lights, but I sensed windows as well.

Another odd thing is that the area where I saw the low light thru the bushes seems to have been well away from the areas cleared for easy parking. If a car had pulled in while I was asleep it (most likely) would not have driven off into that area.

When I awoke and got up to begin driving I sensed nothing at all unusual. I felt like the sleeping bag was zipped just exactly like I had closed it up earlier in the night. I will also add that there were two coyotes yapping away during the night. They seemed VERY close. I have spent a lot of time sleeping out in the west and I was charmed by their calls.

Again, this is probably nothing. What is odd is that I actually searched out the google satellite image when I got home. I didn’t dwell on any of this during the drive and I wasn’t at all concerned that night. I am writing this and sharing it here simply to document what happened. This post might be an insight into my own paranoia or it might be something more.

The Sleeping Spot (exact)
LAT: 38~ 3’29.27”N
LONG: 112~39’17.71”W

The Round Structure (approx)
LAT: 38~ 2’8.90”N
LONG: 112~39’28.32”W

the pull off from Highway 20 to Buckskin Road

Overview of the location. 

Yellow Pin: where I slept, Red Pin: pull off point, 

Blue Pin: low light during the night (approx), White Pin: the white jeep.

An odd little extra: When I turned off of Highway 20 around 9:PM I pulled into the first good spot to park only to realize that the site already had a car there. It was a white Jeep Cherokee with Wyoming license plates. I could see a little movement inside Jeep and I realized that I had probably spooked the people. I backed up and drove to a spot far enough away not to bother them. Their license plate had the prefix 10, and I that means Fremont County Wyoming. I have a lot of friends in that county and I figure anyone from there who would be parked at that spot at that time of the year would probably be my friend, or at least an acquaintance.

The jeep was still there when I drove out early the next morning.

Text added the same day:

First, this was posted at 12:34 PM. This just screams at me to pay attention!

Second, there is some freaky map weirdness, linked HERE. This is the kind of thing that makes this stuff really hard to deny.

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Text added March 10th 2014:

I am adding to this post, exactly a year after the event along side highway 20 in Utah. I drove past this site in mid-February or 2014 on the way to the annual UFO conference in Arizona. I pulled off I-15 and went to the exact same spot and took some photos. I was confirming what I already knew, that there was no round structure on top of that hill.

the arrow points to the exact location of the round structure

I also retraced my route home, exactly as I had done the year before. I slept in the same spot as when I saw the round structure. I laid my pad down on the the exact same flat spot on the ground.

same image as above, but zoomed in and with
the "round structure" added in using photoshop

click on any image for a HI-Rez view
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The experiences described in this post are part of My Confirmation Event.

More about this transformational set of events HERE.

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I have Rh Negative blood

Me and my 12 dollar home blood test card

I just did a home test to determine my blood type. I am A Negative. That means I am Rh Negative.

If anyone has been following what's going on the UFO abduction research circles, you'll know that blood type is now one of the questions that gets asked when interviewing a potential abductee. I just went to a UFO conference and everybody was asking each other about their blood type. The internet is a bottomless pit of confusing information, so I actual have no idea what it might actually mean.

The Rh Negative factor makes up approximately 15% of the worlds population. And, according to some researchers, 54% of UFO abductees have the Rh Negative factor. But, (according to ICAR) A Negative blood makes up 6% of the world population, yet A Negative is only 4.5% of the UFO abductees. This was from a pool of 1,400 that gave their information in the study. To me, this isn't a very large study and I don't know about the details.

My conclusion is (after minimal research) that there is a lot of buzz in among the UFO community, but I can't make out much from the on-line data.

Also, my father has O Negative blood, the universal donor.

Text added in 2018:

Since the publication of this post there has been some new data. Rey Hernandez was part of a team of academics that organized a research project to study Experiencers. The conclusion of his organization is that the Rh factor among experiencers is essentially the same as the general public, roughly around 15%. Their findings would seem to make this post irrelevant.

Also — this has been an extremely popular post.

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direct experience

I have just added a label on this blog, it's noted as DIRECT EXPERIENCE, all capital letters on purpose.

This label is a listing of real-deal incidents. These are things I've experienced that are relevant to the overall "involvement" with this elusive phenomenon. These events and memories seem to imply something.

These labels are a helpful way to search out info on this blog format, it's noted down on the right side-bar. This, along with the TIMELINE, are a good starting point for this blog.

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a terrifying dream that changed to full consciousness

On the night of August 15th I experienced some sort of extremely vivid dream that had a profound impact on me.

I was sleeping at a friends house, and the beginning of the experience was rather dreamlike, although it felt entirely real. I was in the exact location of where I was dreaming, and this was decidedly unusual, it just doesn’t happen to me very often, and when it does there seems to be something paranormal at play. I remember at one point I left the bed I was lying in, went down the stairs and out into the driveway to look at the nighttime sky. There was a sense of waiting, or expectation.

In this part of the dream I seem to remember doing mundane things, like turning the lights on as I moved through the apartment. I came back inside and I remember walking in a hallway that matched the house I grew up in, and this brief moment felt decidedly like a dream.

Shortly after that I returned to the bed.

Then I seemed to have woken up with a jolt, but I strongly suspect that I was still in this dream-state. I looked up and saw five beings (I think it was five) standing around the bed. The bed is just a mattress on the floor, and I was looking up at these beings, and my guess is they were about four feet tall. They were just misty white apparitions, like they were made out of glowing fog. They were just a sort of human shaped outline, and they seemed to be standing motionless.

The image of multiple beings around the bed were vague, and it’s hard for me to remember much. But it matched the interior of the bedroom exactly.

I sat up in bed and put my arm out to touch one of these beings, and my hand passed right through them, but I felt an odd sensation of fuzziness, or a sort of spider web feeling. I was intrigued by this sensation.

I remember feeling absolutely no fear at all as I reached out to them. I felt oddly curious.

But, something else happened, and it seems like it took place a short time after sitting up. It was like an odd flip-flop in the otherwise calm narrative of this dream. What I experienced was unimaginably terrifying.

I was suddenly experiencing a frenetic slide-show of freakish images, it was taking place in my heightened dream-state. The images were like something out of a gruesome set of heavy metal album covers, each image was like a finished piece of surreal artwork. They were bloody and perverse. These highly stylized snapshots looked like a H.R. Giger nightmare. Each hideous image would last less than a second, and then the next would appear, and the next, and the next.

The creepy artwork of H.R. Giger

Initially I was bombarded by these dark visuals while in this dream-state, but the intensity of what was happening seemed to jar me awake, and then I was staring blankly at the bedroom wall. The room was lit with the soft glow of early morning. At this point I was most definitely awake but the slide-show kept going.

These horrific images continued to flash before my eyes, they were literally in a rectangular frame, as if projected in berserkly high resolution on a sort of screen floating directly in line with my sight.

This crazy slide-show of images was something I have never experienced before. Quite honestly, I thought I had gone insane and this was terrifying.

I lay there, with my eyes open and my heart pounding, experiencing a kind of panic attack, but I don’t know how long this fully conscious part lasted. Maybe less than a 30 seconds. But it was enough to scare the shit out of me, the feeling of absolute madness was overwhelming.

Eventually, it faded away, and I was left shaken and drained. When I did get up, I was functioning poorly, and the rest of the day was effected.

Two days later I emailed Anya Briggs in New York, and tried to explain what happened. Anya is a powerful psychic and a friend, I trust her insights. (her blog linked HERE)

The burning question I for Anya was this: Did I get abducted the other night?

She was quick to respond and she reassured me that I did NOT get abducted (and that’s what I felt too) but that some sort of interaction had happened.

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Below is an edited excerpt of a recorded call between myself and Anya a few days later. She did something that seems to happen a lot when we talk together, she slipped into channel mode, and she began to communicate with her guides.

Anya: You are piercing the veil between one reality and the next, they are inter-dimensional beings, they are from somewhere else, they’re not of this world physically and it was real. You weren’t dreaming.

They’ve done this to me. They’ll do something to your head to make you feel like you’re dreaming. That was technology that was used on you. Fear is an acronym for False Expectations And Reality.

This was an initiation and you failed (she laughed), the frequency was so high it frightened you.

Mike: It felt like all of a sudden my mind had been overridden, and I was thrust into this rapid fire slide-show, the images were terrible, gruesome, like H.P. Lovecraft, bloody, monsters - and I had no control over it.

I had lost the ability to control my mind. The sensation of losing my mind was very real, and that really freaked me out, that sensation of insanity.

Anya: Maybe you were temporarily hijacked?

Mike: It sure felt like it!

Anya: You must understand that this is an initiation for a certain type of species to reach out to you, to understand the fear construct better.

And what they were doing, believe it or not, it may have seemed like torture or punishment or something that was thrust upon you against your will, but you had asked for this, Dear One, they’re saying.

It was an outreach program that failed. Their methodology was not working so they’re going to try a different tactic again at some point, to try and understand the fear input without freaking you out. Please understand this was not done with malicious intent. It was not meant to frighten you, but it had the opposite effect. They didn’t understand this.

They wanted to see what you understood as far as the fear construct, and your reaction. The interpretation of events did not go well, and we apologize for that.
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Note: August 15th is the date that Anya Briggs calls her awakening. I have another friend with profound psychic experiences, Susan MacLeod, who also says that August 15th was her awakening. These happened in different years.

Also: I was going to draw an image of the glowing beings around the bed, but this post is so dark, I don't really feel all that inspired. Maybe someday.

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compelled to sleep out under the stars

A map of the area near New Paltz, New York, known as the Shawangunks

At one point in my life I had dedicated myself to rock climbing, this happened while living in New York City. This little story took place in the summer of 1993, and at the time I was 31 (I am 49 as I write this).

I had a secret spot where I liked to sleep out under the stars. It was on top of a dramatic cliff system known as the Shawangunks. This was just a few miles outside of the town of New Paltz, (noted on the map with a RED marker) this is about 90 miles north of New York City. It was near the “hair-pin-turn” if you are at all familiar with the area. I would sneak into the woods and camp alone on the Mohonk Preserve, a protected private park. This is a perfectly lovely spot with a delightful wilderness feel.

The spot where I slept was out on a big expanse of lumpy white rock, this is the same rock formation that makes up the cliff system where all the climbing takes place. The rock itself is a hard, silica-cemented conglomerate of white quartz pebbles and sandstone. My sleeping spot was simply a shallow flat spot, exactly the size of my sleeping pad, and it was absolutely beautiful.

One night (I am quite certain it was a Friday) at about 11:30, I was in my little apartment in Greenwich Village. At that late hour, I was sort of “compelled” to get in my car and drive north to my little secret spot. It was an easy drive that late at night with minimal traffic. As I was on the FDR, I remember thinking to myself, “Wow, they're pushin’ pretty hard tonight.”

It was a 90 minute drive and I parked my car at around 1:AM. I took my sleeping bag and pad into the woods and went to sleep. I have no unusual memories at all. The next morning, I met with some of the local climbers and enjoyed a day of rock climbing.

Now, this “event” can easily be dismissed as just me wanting to get out of the crowded city and get an early start the next morning, I recognize that. Or, just me wanting to sleep outside under the stars in a pretty place; this is something I still do a lot in the summer.

All that said, I’m still confused about that little voice in my head that just kind of blurted out: “Wow, they're pushin’ pretty hard tonight.”

I had read Whitley Strieber’s COMMUNION a few years earlier, and he gave some details about his cabin, and I realized it was rather close to my secret spot, maybe just a few miles away. I only thought about this years later when UNKNOWN COUNTRY noted that Whitley’s cabin was quite close to those cliffs. When I read that, I had a sinking feeling. But why?

I have pin-pointed my secret sleeping spot exactly on a map (noted on the map with a YELLOW marker). I later learned that Whitley’s cabin was near the little town of Accord (noted on the map with a BLUE marker). The town is less than four miles from my sleeping spot. I don’t know the exact location of the cabin, but it could be as close as two miles from my sleeping spot.

I’ll add that some years later, I went up to that spot, but not to sleep. It was the middle of the day and I was visiting New Paltz. I was curious if I could even find it again on the big open expanse of white rock.

I walked straight to it, and on this one lone spot, someone had spray painted a pentagram in a circle. (it may have been an “A” in a circle, I can’t remember exactly). This bit of creepy graffiti was right exactly where I slept! Nothing else was noted anywhere on the huge area. Weird!

That’s it, overall it’s nothing all that eventful, but upon reflection some of the details sure feel strange to me.

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confirmation anxiety

Single frame taken from a video of a hypnotic regression 
with Budd Hopkins in 2007. Note the 1234 within the time ount.

There is one story I haven't posted on this blog, until now. It deals with some personal details and to tell it correctly it needed to be a long essay. I've posted it (below) in a PDF reader. The story involves an experience Budd Hopkins calls confirmation anxiety. There may be no clear answer in this essay, but it does tell of my emotions and explorations during a confusing chapter of my life.

Now my point here is just to relate an interesting experience, nothing more.

This story involves a documentary, now on hold. I talk about this project HERE.

Waking Up Simultaneously

A note of thanks to Peter Robbins who played the role of editor on this essay. 

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angel at the grocery store (audio)

This is an audio file I recorded over a year ago. I just found it on my desktop. It's just me reading a post titled Angel at the Grocery Store. It's under 4 minutes long, and it was the third thing I posted on this blog, and it one of the most heart-warming synchronicities I've ever experienced.

  Listen to this short little essay HERE  

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About that Mexican cashier in the story. She said nothing at all, to me or to the customers ahead of me in the line. She simply smiled and pantomimed everything.

In this essay I said that the Mexican cashier was pretty. Well, let me clarify that. You know who she looked like?

If you were doing a movie about the birth of Christ, and you needed to cast a beautiful young woman to play the role of the Virgin Mary, this girl would be who you would hire. Yes, she looked like the incarnation of Mary, mother of Jesus.

It is as if I had come face to face with an archetype of a mystical kind of purity and sweetness. This silent cashier was the embodiment of a subtle kind of perfect beauty. I had never seen anyone that radiated something so kind and calm—except this silent cashier. The Blessed Virgin/Angel/Cashier I saw looked very much like the actress Catalina Sandino Moreno. The girl I saw was barely 20. 

Catalina Sandino Moreno

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triangle+scar+left+arm searched on-line

Close up of a tiny set of three dots on my left arm. This curious scar has been there since I was in elementary school and it's faded in a way that the lower left dot is barely visible anymore..

There is a curious statistic on my side-bar. If you scroll down and look at the application titled MOST READ POSTS ON THIS SITE, EVER. The majority are audio interviews with popular authors, but there is one that seems out of place. It’s a post I did last summer titled: Tiny dots on my left arm. (linked HERE)

Why is that post so popular? It’s baffled me, until this morning.

I just recently looked at my stat-counter and found where I could check “Keyword Analysis” and found that the fourth most common way people arrive at my site is by searching out this phrase: “triangle scar left arm”

The implication is that people (from around the world) are using google as a tool to search out an answer about triangle scars on their left arms. Since last summer I’ve received a handful of comments (and emails) where people will say that they have the exact same scar, or something very similar.

The fact that this somewhat obscure post is so popular seems to indicate that there is a very pattern of people out there with odd triangle scars on their left arms, and they are seeking answers. The implications of this is extremely curious, at least to me.

A photoshop recreation that matches the memory form my youth. This shows the curious symmetry and definition of the dots. 3/8 of an in is pretty much 1 centimeter.

bright orb seen by Natascha

The red marker is the location of the campsite, and the blue marker shows where Natascha encountered the bright orb. These two points are approximately 1,500 feet apart. Google maps image, double-click for HI-Rez view.

This is a report of something highly unusual. In the very early morning hours of March 3rd, I was sleeping out under the stars with my pal Natascha. We were both lying in the desert sand in a very isolated corner of southern Utah.

We had been to the multi-day UFO conference in Phoenix, and we were taking the scenic route to my home in Idaho. We had been driving and hiking throughout the day, and we set out our sleeping bags just a little bit after sunset. Instead of getting a hotel room, we chose to camp just off the (very beautiful) Burr Trail Road, about 8 miles east of the little town of Boulder Utah. The map of Utah (below) shows our location with a blue marker.

Natascha had recently arrived from Germany, and she was still feeling jet-lagged, so she couldn’t sleep. She got up out of her sleeping bag at about 2:AM, and tried to do some work on her computer in the front seat of the car.

After a while, she felt cold and took a walk on the road with just the stars for light. This is a very narrow road with almost zero traffic, especially during these early morning hours.

I’ll add that during this time I simply lay in my warm sleeping bag near the car.

Here is her (slightly edited) description of the curious events that followed:

I woke up, thinking it might be about 4:AM (it wasn't, it must have been 2:15 or so). Mike didn't want to get up yet, but I was wide awake. I spent some time looking up at the stars and although I felt nice and warm in my sleeping bag, I just couldn't go back to sleep again.

I finally decided to get up to sit in the car and work on the computer for a while.

It was still quite early (approx 3:30) when I went back to Mike, complaining that I'm cold. He said, he won't get up before the sunrise and that I could go for a walk. I said: "I will get lost in the darkness." He said: "There is the road you could take."

So I went for a walk on the road. It felt good to move. I didn't use my headlamp, the ambient light from the stars was enough. After a short time my eyes adapted to the darkness and I could see where I was walking. The road went uphill towards a huge rock feature. I enjoyed walking in the stillness, there was a dark beauty to my surroundings.

But there was more, I could sense something, almost like a buzz in the air, like the air wasn't empty, there was some sparkling. It felt like I could sense energy. I have this sensation once in while, but here in the darkness and this place of pure nature it felt like I had a heightened ability to "see" more than we usually do. My sensations were enhanced.

I was thinking about this heightened sensation when all of a sudden I saw something very unusual: there, about 150 feet away, close to the ground on the right side of the road was a bright light. It flashed, so I just saw it for a second or so. It was round, like an orb and it was so bright that my first thought was that there is somebody with a very bright flashlight. But it didn't make sense, it just flashed and it was very close to the ground.

Next thought (my mind went crazy, because I wanted an explanation), maybe it was a lightning bug? But the round light was much too big, like two feet in diameter. And shortly after realizing that there was no way I could explain this thing, I started to panic. I turned on my heels and ran back to Mike, looking over my shoulder once in a while because it felt like I was followed.

When I arrived at Mike lying on the ground I woke him up, telling him that I saw a bright light like an orb and that I'm scared and that I won't walk around alone anymore. Well, that made him get up.

I have no idea why I was so scared, and I was relieved that we finally packed up and drove away.

(Natascha's entire report, without editing, has been added to the comments below)
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Mike again, chiming in with a little bit more:

While Natascha was walking on that road, I was snug in my sleeping bag drifting in and out of sleep. During this time I heard an owl hooting, over and over, and it was quite close to where I was lying. Here's an audio clip of the very distinctive call of the Great Horned Owl.

Let me add that the night was perfectly lovely, calm and very quiet. The temps were quite chilly, and we both got a lot of frost on our sleeping bags. We saw one car drive down the road shortly after sunset, but as far as I could tell, that was the ONLY car that night.

And - While typing up this post, I got to where I was writing about Natascha's memories, and I felt a little bit presumptuous writing about her direct experiences. And at that exact moment, I received an email from her (while she was sitting in a coffee shop at the Charles Du Gaulle Airport) where she shared her memories. That text is posted above (typed in Arial), with minimal editing by me.

Desert sandstone in beautiful southern Utah, and the logo-image for this blog.

Not metaphorically - LITERALLY!

The cave

Okay - this just happened and I haven’t made any attempt to process or interpret anything, but here goes...

I was up early this morning and my cabin was cold so I put on warm clothes. Sitting at my desk I had a funny feeling under my sweater, right near my left nipple, right at my heart level. It felt like electricity, like an intermittent vibration. I thought that a fly or a mosquito was under my shirt fluttering it's tiny wings against my skin. Like "bzzzzzzzz!"

I've never in my life felt anything like it, and I reached up under my sweater to see it there was something itchy caught inside my shirt. Nothing, but something was definitely odd.

Then, I sent a note (thru facebook) to a guy who I met at a UFO conference, and minutes later he replies to me in a phone call. We talk for almost two hours (imagine that).

At a certain point during the phone call he tells me one of his experiences, a scary story. He said he was alone in his bedroom and suddenly, everything shifts and he's was trapped in a cave. It's wet and the floor is lumpy and cold. He tells me the details and he insists it’s REAL and not a dream. There some sort of projected fear, and he feels that he's being tortured. The story culminates with a GIANT predator lizard confronting him with threats of death.

Okay, crazy story, easy to dismiss as a dream or delusion, right? BUT - for the five minutes while he tells me this cave story - the electric buzzing under my sweater is basically switched ON. The very real sensation stays on for the whole story, and switches off when he’s done.

This was intense, someone shares a fantastically strange experience - AND I FEEL IT AT A HEART LEVEL. Not metaphorically - LITERALLY!!!!

Hows that!

Also, this guy has a lot of profound UFO related stuff in his life, but he doesn’t have many scary stories, he’s had almost exclusively wonderful loving experiences, and he says he’s told almost nobody about the experience in the cave. He went on to speculate that he feels such bliss during meditation that maybe his nice vibes pissed off the big evil predator lizard.

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Lemme try to better describe the electric buzzing sensation. It felt like a toy Barbie cell phone set on vibrate was set lightly on the skin of my left part of my chest.

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October 2009 (audio)

My pose of existential exhaustion, a self-portrait of the final hours of the final day of October while on the phone with Anya Briggs.

The month of October 2009 was, without question, one of the most bizarre and impressive things that I've ever experienced.

I was literally swallowed up in series of unrelenting synchronicities, each more profound than the one proceeding it. It felt like it was impossible to try to process what was happening in the moment and now, almost a full year later, I've made a real-deal effort to try and look at the events of that whirl-wind month.

If I tried to write out what went down, it would end up being a novel. So I created an audio retelling, as best as I could, of those 31 days.

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audio download / 1 hour 52 minutes long

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Beyond my retelling of the events of the month, this audio includes recorded conversations with Stacey, Marla Frees, a psychic session with Anya Briggs a Tarot reading from William Henry and The Beach Boys. There is some heartfelt stuff about my friend Mac Tonnies, and this felt really important to share. It might be helpful to review the ongoing blog entries during that month. Those were posted in real time, and my sense of mystification is palpable. Click here to see every post from October of '09.

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Update added March 8th, 2011:

Owls make an appearance while recording this deeply introspective podcast. Here's a curious bit of confirmation (at least for me) that the stuff in this audio essay is important. I share the haunting events in a separate post (HERE).

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Tiny dots in a triangle on my left arm

Two small dots, easily viewed on my left arm.

Close up of the dots.

The location of the very faint third dot. In my youth, this one was just as prominent as the other two, creating a perfect little triangle. If this is a vaccine scar, someone please tell me!

A question I often get from researchers is: do I have any unusual marks or scars on your body?

At first I just answered no, and later I realized I have a scar on my nose (click HERE for more info). And recently I found an odd scratch on my torso (click HERE).

There are only two dots that remain distinct, the third has almost completely faded away. I can still see the third dot in certain light, but it is very indistinct. I drew in a red circle where it appears on my arm.

I realized that I have a funny triangle shaped set of three pock-marks below my wrist on my left arm. I have had these since (as best as I can recall) elementary school, and that means about 1974 or so. I just turned 48, so these marks have been on my arm for about 36 years (and that is a rough guess). As a boy, I would marvel at how perfection of the triangular shape. I have no memory of getting any sort of medical inoculation. If this is simply a vaccine scar, someone PLEASE tell me. I did a quick search for "vaccine scars" and "inoculation scars" and saw a lot of gruesome images, but none that even remotely matched what I have on my arm.

I took photos today, after shaving the hair off the small area. I put a little vegetable oil on the area to help see the dots and took macro photos with a digital point and shoot in the bright sunshine next to a window. I also increased the contrast on the digital photo (using photoshop) and this helped bring the image out a little more clearly. Please note, I included an un-altered photo at the end of this post, as well as a photoshop recreation as to how they appeared in my youth. The dots are all 3/8 inch apart from each other.

This is a photoshop recreation. This is how I remember it looked in my youth, I was fascinated by the curious symmetry of the dots.

The red lines show the location of the triangular dot pattern on my arm. The tiny dots themselves are difficult to see in this wide view.

Digital image without any contrast change. This is how the dots presently appear. You can see how the lower left dot has faded, but it still visible.

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ADDED TEXT June 2011:

There is a follow up to this post. This essay has been one of the most popular on this blog, here's a LINK where I speculate why that might be.

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