Each of your sightings though are quite exhilarating in terms of visual qualities and circumstance. I can see how each of them would have been quite startling. If I read this correctly these three sightings took place in a 14 year period with no previous or following sightings. So if you're interested in answering the following great and if not no problem. I'm very interested in the impacts on the witness and who the witness was prior to their experiences. Outside of the OBE did you ever have any specific engagement with paranormal issues or UFO's?
I'm happy to respond to your questions, Burnt
Outside of the OBE did you ever have any specific engagement with paranormal issues or UFO's?
.
Not to my knowledge, but who knows what transcient experiences, senses of reality, and subconscious insights have occurred with any of us earlier in life, especially as children?
Was there a point during or after that 14 year period, that you could define as the demarcation period of seriously pursuing UFO investigation through reading the literature etc., or did that come in waves across your life and then intensify later on?
I can date the beginning of my reading ufo research to the summer of 1997, and my reading was intensive from then on. The trigger was reading the USA Today coverage of the Phoenix Lights events (in June of '97 as I recall) that had occurred the previous February. The article and the two-pages of photographs and sketches got my attention not just because of the size of the observed ufo(s) seen within a short time over several hundred miles of Arizona, but because I realized that if the large triangle/boomerang described were real and not ours, I would eventually need to prepare my daughter for a world potentially very different from the one I'd thought she'd be growing up in. This was six and a half years after our sighting from the Delta plane over Lake Michigan; she was then ten years old.
These experiences appear to still be with you in a very strong & vivid way - if you had to name their current value to yourself, just how significant are they and why?
Like the OBE, the three anomalous sightings I described are unforgettable and remain vivid in my memory. But so does what I experienced in a car accident about five months previous to my spontaneous OBE -- the apparent slowing down of time as the car I was in skidded on ice and headed off the road directly toward the tree we impacted. During those few seconds my attention was apparently riveted on our progress toward the tree; I seemed to be aware of every moment/instant that progressed as we moved toward the crash, until it happened. I was also thinking, very calmly and dispassionately, throughout this duration that 'we are going to crash into that tree'. I felt no panic or fear, and I wondered why in the weeks following. I was in the front passenger seat; the car was an old one without seatbelts; I was thrown forward in the impact and my forehead cracked the windshield. I found myself on the floor of the car after the impact and realized that the hot liquid streaming down over my face was blood. I thought I might die fairly soon so I asked the other two people in the back seat (whose voices I could hear) if they would tell my parents that I loved them. Eventually (the driver having left the car to find a phone to call for an ambulance) there were several EMTs opening the car door and shining flashlights in. They took me to a hospital, where I had surgery and remained for about a week.
{There is an interesting connection between that surgery and a mistaken identity in a dream I'd the night before the OBE five months later, which suggests that the OBE was triggered by my realizing for some reason {at midday that day, while reading a novel by Robert Penn Warren for my next class} that I had masked the identity of the person I was talking with in the dream. A few months later I learned that the actual person I'd been talking with in the dream had been present at that surgery (he was a med student who worked at the hospital) and that he had fainted in the operating room because of the copious blood flowing from my head wound). I've thought about rereading that novel in order to figure out what I read in it that day that unmasked the person in my dream, which was my last thought before I suddenly found my consciousness up in the far corner of the room observing myself from behind. I think it's possible that I was subconsciously aware of his fainting in the operating room when it happened and that this (or the reactions of the other medics present) had frightened me, keeping my recollection of it hidden until for some reason the dream and his actual identity connected for me as I sat reading the Warren novel. If so, it bears out the intricate and often submerged lived experience retained and still connected in the mind at nonconscious levels.
The other thing I've reflected on is the similarity between my own dispassionate consciousnsess as I thought 'we are going to crash into that tree' and the dispassionate consciousness I experienced during the minutes of the OBE -- and also the dispassionate other consciousness I encountered/heard speaking as my OBE perspective moved along the ceiling to a point where I could better observe my physical body sitting across the room still apparently bent over the novel in my hands on the desk. This other consciousness I felt to be female and older than me and she seemed to be attached to me but not always present. My impression from what I overheard from her was that she'd been signalled or summoned to pay attention to what was going on with me and her attitude was that 'I was in a mess but it was no big deal'. Then she vanished and my consciousness suddenly relocated to its customary residence in my body. At that point I was shocked by what I'd just experienced and sought advice at the University Counselor's office. I described what had happened to the head counselor; he called a neurologist near campus and asked him to see me aright away. The neurologist could find no neurological explanation for the OBE and wrote me a prescription for tranquilizers, which I took for awhile.
If I'd read phenomenological philosophy at that time, or if I had an interest in brain studies, or if interdisciplinary Consciousness Studies existed as a field of inquiry then, I'd have had the good sense to investigate what I'd experienced. But I quickly reentered the stream of my accustomed life, sense of life, and put the experience aside. Nevertheless I remember it, and have often remembered it, vividly in the years since, especially since I began pursuing the field of Consciousness Studies. I think we 'know' immensely more about the nature of reality than we are consciously aware of, and that psychical research and parapsychology are among the main paths to our understanding more of what we know in our subconscious minds.
Do you see any of those unique experiences, including the OBE, connected in any way?
Yes. I think they all are opportunities for thinking about, and understanding more about, the nature of reality from perspectives outside our 'normal', culturally defined presuppositions concerning what-is in the physical world as a whole and what we already know about it in our subconscious minds.
Did the UFO experiences all exhibit what could be described as operating under intelligent control?
Yes. I sensed that the encased light off the Delta wingtip was observing the plane and operating under its own purposeful control. In the second sighting, of the shape-shifting ufo, the object [first visible as a light, then as an object up in the treetops] definitely seemed to be going about its own business. When it moved out over the street and assumed the shape of a triangle, it seemed instantly somewhat smaller and at once more distant than it could have been given my perspective from the street, as if it were moving in a dimension or time separate from the one I existed in and yet was showing itself to me, moving so slowly that I could study its appearance. The plasma that swept past my car on the country road in Georgia seemed to possess intention and will, seemed to be indifferent to the car or anyone in it as it pursued some goal somewhere farther down the road. It seemed to be vigorously alive.
Is this emblematic of the common mutations of ufological inquiry or merely a symptom of the thread's content?
