Strange Days

I have been boggled by the number of high strangeness events being reported on my website recently. There are mysterious bird deaths and strange meteors all over the world, and a sudden odor of gas in the New York/New Jersey area that frightened millions of people. And these are just a few of the high-strangeness events that are being reported. We are still getting a steady flow of emails about people seeing openings in the air with other worlds visible in them, or strange geometric shapes floating through their yards, etc. Plus, there are UFO stories coming in from all over the place, more, at least being reported to our website, than we have ever seen before.

It’s just plain weird, and if you stay with me fasten your seatbelt, because I’m about to make it even weirder.

Let’s talk first about that New York odor. A friend who lives in Manhattan described his experience of it as follows, “The phone rang and it was my wife calling from her office. She said they were leaving the building because of a massive gas leak. I hung up and went downstairs to go out, with the idea of going to the building when I was practically knocked over by a wall of about the strongest odor of gas that I have ever smelled. I thought the whole city was about to explode.”

So far, no trace has been found of the source of the odor, just like no explanation has been found for the bird deaths, nor for the fact that strange meteors have been seen in numerous locations around the world.

One would think that even asking the question, ‘are they connected?’ would be ridiculous. But they may be. Among the things that are ejected when a star goes supernova are gamma rays, which travel at nearly the speed of light, and also more solid matter such as microscopic particles of iron and larger chunks of chemicals and debris which are not like normal meteors, composed of iron and nickel, but much more loosely constructed amalgams of elements that cooled suddenly right after the explosion.

A star called Geminga, about 150 light years from earth, went supernova 41,000 years ago, and might have had a very profound effect on our planet. First, the gamma ray burst, which would have struck about 200 years after the explosion, could be responsible for the sudden extinction of virtually all large animals in Australia that took place at that time. But then, about 13,000 years ago, a second blast would have arrived, containing the physical debris, which would have been moving, of course, much more slowly than the gamma rays.

At that time, there was a mass extinction on this planet. It was when the mammoths all suddenly died, and when the great glaciers melted.

Now, 13,000 years later, we are on the opposite side of the galaxy from where we were then, but so is the debris field. Where it is exactly, we cannot know. But the meteor count has been rising steadily all this century, and, since about 1900, there have been many reports of exotic meteors, such as the screamer that just struck in South Africa, but did no apparent damage and, of course, the Tunguska event of 1906 which did great damage but did not act like a heavy nickel-iron meteor at all.

We could easily be passing through this debris field again, and if we are, there could be high-velocity microparticles striking the atmosphere from time to time, and such particles would instantly kill anything they hit, if enough of them were involved. Because they are so small, though, they burn up very quickly. The only way they could get near the surface of the planet would be if their velocity was extremely high–and it would be, probably in excess of 3,000 mph, or even faster. Such particles would certainly kill birds. They would pass right through anything they came into contact with, but as they reached the thicker lower atmosphere, they would slow rapidly. In most cases, they would either have vaporized or become too slow to do any damage. But to a delicate creature like a bird, maybe not.

Methane makes up an appreciable part of the mass of comets, and hydrogen sulfide is present in some of them as well. Some scientists believe that gasses like this are part of supernova ejecta. If so, there will be most likely other appearances of this strange odor elsewhere in the world. Another possibility is that this gas emerged out of the Hudson Canyon, a large geological feature offshore of the mouth of the Hudson River.

This would have come from melting hydrates, and be a side-effect of global warming. Another possibility, of course, is an accidentaly release of mercaptan, the chemical used to give natural gas its odor. Mercaptan is very volatile and the odor could travel over a wide area during a temperature inversion, which was taking place over New York at the time the smell was discovered.

It is worth remembering, though, that we live in a big, rough universe and nature on this planet is out of balance. So we need to be very careful about two things: first, we need not to close our minds to the possibility of the unexpected happening; second, we need to be very careful and skeptical about the sorts of answers we might get from government officials and scientists, too many of whom tend to conceal unusual findings because they are afraid of having to defend them.

It’s a little ironic that my last journal entry was originally called “The Triumph of Mankind,” and no sooner was it posted than this rash of weird events started unfolding. I changed the title to “Will Mankind Avert Catastrophe?” because some of the letters I was getting and the comments on my message boards suggested that people were reading only the title and the first few sentences and drawing the conclusion that I had somehow transformed into a pollyanna.

Not so. Deeper in the entry (now also at the top) is my comment that we are facing major environmental challenges that we will need to overcome if we are to survive at all, a position that I have been taking publicly since the publication of Nature’s End in 1984, and which is far more true now even than it was then.

I have also been wondering a lot about the Mayan Calendar and 2012 and the Popul Vuh’s predictions. It is, frankly, getting a little creepy. The sun is supposed to become highly active, according to NASA, right around 2010 and 2011. And if we are indeed entering a cosmic debris field, that is apt to be true in spades, because that debris will affect the sun, as well.

So, if this all transpires as it looks like it might, what are we to make of the fact that an ancient, apparently primitive civilization, knew about it in advance?

That sort of thing–answering questions like that–is a big part of what this site, and Dreamland, is all about. I have to tell you that, as we come closer and closer to what is without question a time of great change, I do feel a stronger and stronger sense of mission, and so do the people who I am interviewing for the show, and the ones who gather news for this website.

The mission is about understanding all of this in a whole new way, so that we can meet what I am increasingly sure will be the greatest challenges the species has faced in 13,000 years, and maybe ever.

I think our ancestors had what I like to call ‘exquisite instincts.’ I do not think that their civilization was technologically prolific like ours is, or we would see more debris than a few batteries and some exquisitely fashioned gear mechanisms.

Think, if you went forward a few thousand years and looked at the debris we had left behind. There would be rusting 747s, reefs of styrofoam cups, the remains of buildings, roads and bridges all over the planet.

That’s not what we see from the distant past. What we see are a few fabulously engineered monuments and a number of inexplicable objects such as the Baghdad battery and the mysteriously hollowed out diorite jars of the Egyptians.

I suspect, though, that they were indeed more advanced than we are. They would, perhaps, not have been able to tell you the math behind what they were building, or show you a plan, but that was because their intelligence, which was at least as great as ours, was still rooted in their natural being, not resident exclusively in their reason.

To have a future, we must regain exactly that about our own past selves. We must re-awaken our exquisite instincts, the ones we are so out of touch with that we don’t even realize that they exist.

But they do. You can feel them, distantly, if you are patient with yourself. They come on a tide of love from a far place that is also deep in the heart and mind of every one of us.

We need to catch that wave and balance there, so that we can experience the grand future that has been intended for us, I believe, since the beginning of time.

NOTE: This Journal entry, previously published on our old site, will have any links removed.