I dare you folks to step out of your Serious JFKA Researcher modes and admit there is some weird shit that goes on in this world. I don't consider myself "mystical" at all, but I've had weird incidents at the rate of 2-4 per year to the point that I started keeping a log or diary some 25 years ago. Here are two that were entirely objective -
i.e., you would've experienced the same things if you'd been there.
1. Complex incidents of synchronicity - "meaningful coincidence" or what Jung called an "acausal connecting principle" - absolutely fascinate me. In 2007, I was a widower awaiting the arrival of my fiance from Belarus. I had ordered from art.com some eight pieces of art to freshen up the house. I was online looking at them. I asked my paralegal across the hall, named Vicki, if she'd ever seen the site. Looking over my shoulder, she asked "Do they have anything by Gustav Klimt?" I brought up what they had, and Vicki said "Oh, my God, 'The Kiss' - that's my
favorite painting!" OK, whatever. A week later, I was awaiting the arrival of the final piece - a droll Victorian print of Mama Cat teaching her studious-looking children how to catch mice. It arrived. I looked at the shipping invoice - yep, here it was. I opened the box and pulled out "The Kiss" by Gustav Klimt.
What??? I just about fainted. I got back online to make sure I hadn't gone into some sort of trance and ordered "The Kiss." Nope. I contacted art.com. "Eh, mistakes sometimes happen at the warehouse. Send it back." I asked Vicki if she wanted it, but $300 was too much for her. Fast-forward some five years. I had retired (working from home) and Vicki had died. Some good friends from out of town were visiting to go to lunch. My wife was still getting ready. We were standing right in front of the print of Mama Cat, so I told them my "The Kiss" story. We drove to the restaurant at an historic hotel down the road. They have a gift shop and a little book nook where they sell books on local history and whatnot. While the others were in the gift shop, I stuck my head in the book nook. There was a little table with exactly one book sitting upright on it: a metallic gold dustjacket with "GUSTAV KLIMT" in big red letters. I have no idea what a book on Klimt would have been doing there. I just about fainted again and of course bought it.
Weird.2. My late wife was in a morphine-induced coma in a hospice the last 30 days. I worked all morning, then rode my motorcycle to the hospice in the afternoon. She could have died at any time, but nothing suggested her death was imminent. I arrived back home and was startled by what I found. Sitting upright on the carpet was a little teddy bear she had received at a cancer survivor's retreat. It had been sitting on top of her jewelry box on a 5-foot bookshelf in the corner of our bedroom where I had arranged a little "shrine" to her and her late parents. I tried gently toppling Mr. Teddy about 50 times but could never get him to land upright or where he was found. Odd, I thought. An hour later, I was in the kitchen making dinner. I put a muffin in the little toaster oven I used every morning and evening. As I was making a salad at the counter, there was a huge POP! I turned to the cat on my right and said "What the hell was
that?" I then turned to my left and saw that the toaster oven was little glowing orange and the muffin was a piece of charcoal, as though 50,000 watts had shot through it. I carefully unplugged it. The phone almost immediately rang - it was, of course, the hospice telling me my wife had died soon after I left. The next morning, the toaster oven was fine. But wait, there's more ...
A few weeks later, I was puttering in the bedroom when the stereo simply started playing a CD all by itself. Having had some prior incidents with electrical devices (as did my wife), I jokingly said into the air "Bev, was that you?" I turned off the stereo and went to get the clothes out of the dryer. I brought them into the bedroom and the stereo immediately started playing again. "Do that again and I'll be impressed." I then went grocery shopping at Safeway, so it was more than an hour later before I entered the bedroom again. Yep. "OK, I'm impressed." I shared this incident (one of many, many such incidents that have been reported) with arch-skeptic Michael Shermer, who had shared a similar incident in the pages of
Scientific American, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/anomalous-events-that-can-shake-one-s-skepticism-to-the-core/. Shermer caught so much flak from his arch-skeptic fans that he was forced to distance himself from what he had written. To me, he merely talked about the need to keep "an open mind." Uh-huh.
I could recount at least 30 or more incidents of weirdness the equal of these. When someone says to me "
Nothing like that has
ever happened to me" my response (to myself) is always "Bullshit - you are either willfully blind or you are sleepwalking through life." One of my personal axioms is that if you share experiences like the above with any group of five relatives, friends or colleagues,
at least two of them will share experiences so jaw-dropping that they make yours sound hardly worth relating.
