well im hooked, bring on part two

back to synchronicity I have an old friend who I have known since we were 18, well we were both in the RAF and happened to get posted to the same stations regularly but there was a period when we were at completly different parts of the plannet for about 3 years, and we lost touch and hadnt spoken for about 2 year.

One night shift, I was sitting in the ops room in the north of scotland watching for big bad russian spy planes on my radar, I happened for some reason to be thinking, I must find out where he is and get in touch.

Anway, just as i decided to do that, the ops line from one of the south england sites started flashing and I answered it, expecting it to be an operational call about that nights alert fighter planes which it was.

BUT (and I know you have all guessed this part anyway) the person at the other end was my friend who had just been posted back to the UK and was on his first nightshift.

After we had sorted out the official business concerning tornado and phantom fighters, we had a good natter and caught up, but he finnished by saying"how weird is this, I was just think where abouts you may be, and that i should get in touch"

Spooky eh?

Part two...

(last part for today as I have to do the dinner and the washing now - so hopefully part three to come tomorrow)

A few months after the dream/explosion - with this now forgotten - I heard from a man called Webb who had read another book of mine. This had included a discussion of the Apollo 13 synchronicity.

Basically this is about how Jules Verne in 'From the earth to the moon' and 'Round the Moon' had written similar facts into his stories 100 years before the real events involved a mission launched from Florida, featuring a craft called the Columbiad (Columbia) that had to use the slingshot/gravity tactic to get back to earth...pretty much what did happen.

Of course, some of this is because Newtonian physics is much the same whether you write Science Fiction or are making that fiction into fact. But it led us into an interesting discussion by letter across late l985/early l986 (there was no e mail in l985!)

Webb told me that he believed the theory in the Nigel Kneale story Quatermass and the Pit might be true...Kneale talks about race memories passed through generations that imprint images and words into our conscousness (in the case of that story - the horned demon/devil/hobgoblin as a human race memory of martians). Webb did not know how much this meant to me - it being the first TV show that I had ever seen (when very tiny) and that it had triggered my life's work in the paranormal. Indeed I had written about it in the context of alien abductions and had spent time exploring the possible reality behind Kneale's thinking.

Webb suggested that seemingly random events could act on the collective consciousness to try to warn us about coming danger. He suspected this whilst watching the movie Superman III on TV in September 1985. Part of his reasoning was the feeble sounding coincidence of the name of the villain in the movie (Ross Webster) to his own name. But he had no way to know that this movie was a piece of family folklore since one of my (distant) relatives is in it. Her name is Annie Ross - this name thereby linking with his name so as to make that feeble name connection a much more powerful coincidence.

Ross = Webb = Ross Webster

In the Superman movie (from Columbia Pictures) the villain seeks to cause havoc by creating terrible floods in Colombia destroying the coffee harvest. This involved the use of a spacecraft called Vulcan named after the god of fire (same root as the word Volcano).

Just a few weeks later a real volcano in Colombia exploded, melting snow and ice and flooding towns and crops with large loss of life. Webb was sure this was why he had had the bad feeling during the TV screening and sent me the relevant issue of TV Times to prove the dating if the 'precognition'.

At that time neither of us knew how much deeper into a chain reaction of weird events all of this was taking us - for this was again nothing like the end of the story. Hopefully we will get there tomorrow and see how this all fits together in true 'Bad Wolf' fashion.

As a further neat twist, whilst Webb was writing his letter to me about all of the above (as he had no way to know) I was many miles away on a volcano taking part in an experiment to test long range precognition for a magazine.

As the next few weeks were to prove all these memes (good DW word there) featuring in both parts of this story so far would come together in quite extraordinary fashion.

It's funny that you should mention noticing synchronicity more once you start thinking about it. When you start training in cognitive-behavioural therapy often you're asked to do this exercise. This week, as you wonder about, see how often you spot cassette or video tape unspooled on the street. You may have never noticed it before, but once you start being aware of it............

ok, heres one.

So, i work in a bar, and as we have a high staff turn over we tend to have a lot of students come and go. And during the summer months a lot of them go travelling, gap yearing, etc.

One student, Geoff, went travelling for a year a couple of summers ago, a girl Marriane went away for around 6 months, and another whos name i forget went to australia on a family holiday. All travelling independently they ran into each other, in a nightclub on a boat in sydney harbour. what are the chances....

Part Three...

As Webb and I continued to discuss matters between November l985 and January l986 the coincidences kept on piling up.

He told me that Superman III was made by a production company called Dovemead. Columbia itself derived from the Latin for Dove. Doves were associated with the Biblical Flood the like of which had just struck Colombia. This theme was even mentioned in the movie screenplay. In the Bible Mary Magdalene was the keeper of the Doves and the town most badly damaged in Colombia was on the River Magdalena.

He used all this to explain why he was so concerned about these warnings enough to fear that the Quatermass and the Pit theory about a cultural meme might be correct. He sent me a copy of the Quatermass script and wanted my support in a campaign he was running to stop local excavation of a site called Hob Lane -Hob, as in devil, is central to the Quatermass plot.

I could rejoinder that I had helped Columbia pictures to promote their movie 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' (I attended the premiere - the only film where I have ever done this). Key to this movie is a group of characters led unconsciously to a hill known as the Devil's Tower. And I had written in my books of how 'devil names' associate with high levels of strange phenomena all across Europe as this is a real concept.I also knew the man upon whom the key character in this scene was based (a French scientist). Oh yes, and the man who introduced me to the NASA astronaut back in l983 actually has a cameo role as himself in 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind'.

Meantime I was receiving floods of other letters from people telling me of their apparent prescience about the Colombia ice/volcano disaster. I was at the time researching wide scale precognition of global disasters.

One of the most vivid came from a man who related his belief to a dream in which he saw something climb up into the sky from the east coast of the USA. He told med that he thought thid had something to do with the disaster because he was visiting the Hotel Columbia.

As all of this was going on in December l985 and January l986 Webb and I were fixated on the fire and ice of the Colombia natural disaster unaware that something else was going on.

This involved the east coast of the USA and another Columbia - not the country of Colombia. NASA was seeking to launch its shuttle called Columbia but again and again it was cancelled due to bad weather, fears of danger and unexpected glitches that cropped up at the last second. When it did get launched even NASA staff thought that something was up given the catalogue of delays.

The very next mission only a couple of weeks after this oft aborted flight was to be the one that I had discussed with the NASA astronaut back in November l983. The first flight to carry a non NASA civilian into space.

Last Part...

Okay, so I think you all know what happened to the next shuttle launch in January l986. Challenger took off, ice on the rings connecting the fuel tank severed the bond leading to a massive fery explosion and tragedy. All the crew died, including that first civilan in space - a school teacher.

When I saw the film two things struck me. Firstly, my dream from 14 months earlier was acted out for real. Secondly, the link with fire and ice as in the Colmbia disaster and all the coincidences that Webb and I had been debating for the past few weeks came together again.

The next day newspapers carried gruesome photos on their front page of the Challenger explosion, showing the booster rockets spiralling off out of control. This one graphic shot frozen in time forever above Florida has a very chilling resonance with the Quatermass and the Pit story. It is almost identical to the climactic scene of that story where an image of the horned demon towers into the sky.

Then I discovered the copy of TV Times that Webb had sent me a few weeks earlier to kick start the debate. Remember that it was to show me the date that Superman III had aired, thus proving it preceded the Colombia natural disaster. Indeed it did, but one thing that neither of us had noticed before was now glaringly obvious. At the very same time that the movie was on TV, right next to it in the adjacent channel in the listings (Channel 4) there was a TV show called Spaceflight and an episide entitled 'The Territory Ahead' in which it was discussed what might be the cultural reaction of human consciousness to the inevitable major space shuttle disaster that experts said was bound to happen sooner or later.

We both just felt stunned at this. It was as if all the clues were there (bad wolf style) trying to get us to cotton on to the right cultural meme. And we missed it. I have wondered ever since whether the world as a collective organism might use the nature of coincidence via quantum mechanics to generate global synchronicities that do, indeed, map out 'the territory ahead'.

And you thought that the Bad Wolf concept in DW was weird?

BTW as a postscript - my user name on this site partly comes from the village in Derbyshire where I used to live. I moved there some years after the above events by chance. Its name was Dove Holes and (as I only found out after living there) was overlooked by a hill called Hob Tor.

That's a striking story, Jaycee.
Back to DW (but still on topic), you might remember that on the IMDB, a fan of Red Dwarf waggishly put that Norman Lovett was to play Davros in the finale. He said he did it just because the thought of it was funny, and the serious reaction to it was 'hilariously funny'.
Oddly, it turns out that 'Lovett' meant 'wolf', in Anglo Norman.

As an aside, Holly was punned on HAL9000, who I seem to remember, also paraphrased the 'Houston, we have a problem...'

As another aside - Not surprised you moved! Who wants to be pigeon-holed?

Just as a quick update, have been watching how often 'Big Bad Wolf' is cropping up in TV scripts. So far (aside from Cold Case) have noticed three other mentions in dramas over the past 10 days or so. Most seem to have been recorded before the end of DW.

Question is: Is this a synchronicity? Or are we just noticing this term now that it means something, when it cropped up just as often in the past but passed us by as it then meant nothing special?

Or is RTD getting his meme into the entire TV schedules?

Must go, just off to write my new hit drama - The adventures of Bad Wolf.