Greetings from Mars(con). It's early saturday afternoon and I'm sitting at my table at the MarsCon SF convention in Bloomington (Minneapolis), MN. Saturday is a bit slow - I think people are still a bit hung over from the evening before. The evening before (loosely defined) lasted until about 2 AM, and for several people I talked with today, until about 4.
I did my talk (similar to past years) on close encounters last night at about 11PM. It ran until midnight and actually finished on time. Most of the people in the talk had heard a similar talk in the past, but also, most of the people in the room were experiencers. So I hurried through the material in the talk and focused upon discussion among those in the room.
Several people there, I knew for years. One is actually in The Cosmic Bridge (part of an aggregate case where I describe screen memories of childhood encounters). A couple of other experiencers in the room, I knew had had encounters but I had not talked with them extensively. It turned out that most of the people in the room had had similar experiences, however. Of the four of us who hung on until about 2AM, two of them described some very interesting reality anomalies. Both described events comprising what I could only call a parallel reality.
In The Cosmic Bridge, I talk about a number of reality anomalies, including several involving Evelyn, the abductee in the northwestern Wisconsin experiencer case. In that case, she noted several cases in which the nature of her house - specifically the window opening outward were different from what the were in normal reality (in normal reality, the window doesn't open).
In our discussions last night, I learned a couple of similar accounts. In one case, the experiencer and her husband found upon arriving home that their house was different. Somehow, that night, the hot and cold water faucets were reversed. This lasted that night, then in the morning they found that they were back in normal order once more.
Another involved a case in which an experiencer described as a child, travelling on a field trip with a youth group. While there, he visited the home of an authoer whom he followed quite closely (details sketchy as I only learned this in passing at about 1AM). Later on in life, he again met the person and and in conversation referred to his visit many years before - the result being a mystified stare. Apparently, at least in this reality, there was no memory of the visit.
Curious, he checked back with the youth group he had been involved with. To his surprise, he found that there was no such trip in their records, or in anybody's memory. It was as if the trip had never happened, at least in this reality. Only he remembered it. This particular person described a number of other such anomalies in his family, a history of anomalous events and shifted reality.
I have heard a number of other descriptions of apparent parallel reality events, time shifts and other anomalous shifts in the personal experiences of events. In one such case, an experiencer and his girlfriend described driving back into Saint Paul from Wisconsin, suddenly finding themselves on a different (and strange-looking) highway. Thinking they were lost, they exited on the nearest exit. As they did, he noticed that the "world looked unfinished - like an unfinished stage set." He decided to turn around by going over the bridge and getting back on the freeway going the other direction. As he crossed the bridge, he found that the car conked out. His next memory is being back on I94, back on track as they were entring Saint Paul.
The UFO researcher Jenny Randles coined the term, 'Oz Factor' to describe such anomalous 'twilight-zone' effects. While in some cases, it seems to involve a 'quieting' of the surroudings - no frogs, crickets, wind in the trees, etc. - in other cases it appars to be a deeper shift in the reality of the experiencer's world itself.
What is going on here? Is there a plasticity to reality itself? Are the experiencers actually shifting into some form of parallel reality? Is there an overlay of realities present? Or is there another explanation - perhaps 'merely' perceptual in nature? I suspect that the answer to this question will tell us more about both the UFO/CE4 phenomenon and about the nature of reality, itself. My own belief is that we really understand far less than we think about the actual nature of reality. Furthermore, the anomalies associated with the UFO/CE4 phenomenon provide us with some 'in your face' clues about the answers the question. Like so many scientific breakthroughs, often the clues to the mystery are hidden in plain sight.
As I write this, another experiencer I talked with last night, stopped by the table and gave me more details on a sighting I had written up on the MUFON Case Management System a few years ago. It was another classic CE1 (at least I think it was a '1'), with the classic 'oz factor' silence. She also describes being very psychic and a deep psychic relationship with both her son and her daughter.
One of the reasons I do talks at SF cons like MarsCon is that many experiencers seem to gravitate toward SF as a way to handle the ubiquitous encounter influences in their life. And on this weekend I was certainly not disappointed.
