More REAL Magic

In a recent Dreamland, quantum physicist Fred Alan Wolf told Whitley that time travel could be real. Those of you who follow this website know that we’ve been having our own time travel adventures. Now Starfire Tor, along with her magician friend Brandon Scott, have done MORE investigating about exactly may have happened to Starfire and Anne Strieber that night in the Magic Castle.

Brandon writes: “I was on stage preparing for my show, when the time line anomaly event was experienced, and therefore was not at the ladies restroom location when it happened. I heard the whole story after my performance. Earlier, Anne and Whitley Strieber, and Starfire Tor and I dined at the Magic Castle before my 10:30 PM stage show. We all shared many experiences and interests, including the topics of time travel, time line anomalies, and instances when people had appeared and disappeared in the most unlikely of places in the strangest of ways. I have experienced some of these appearances myself, when I was with Starfire Tor. There is a good reason why she is the discoverer of Time Shifts and the Core Matrix, and those who have been fortunate enough to work with her find that out sooner or later. When you are around Starfire Tor, ‘time’ and ‘reality’ have a habit of shifting.

“As a professional stage magician, my expertise includes creating the illusion of people disappearing and appearing. I also have an interest in the paranormal, time travel, UFOs, psychic abilities, and Synchronicities. Starfire Tor has called me in on many of her Time Shift and time line anomaly research investigations. She utilizes my expertise to determine unintentional misidentification of physical phenomena, as well as intentional physical fraud perpetrated by a claimant. Starfire and I agreed that we needed to return to the Magic Castle, to conduct a more thorough investigation on whether the ladies restroom had a hidden door. The Striebers also needed conclusive evidence, even though we all did a cursory search of the ladies restroom the night of the time line anomaly event, and found no hidden or visible secondary door.

“Upon Starfire Tor’s request, I had done some research for her report by consulting reliable sources about the construction and history of that ladies restroom. I discovered that there was no hidden door, and that the room had not been a part of the original mansion that eventually became the Magic Castle. For the Striebers, Starfire Tor, and myself, the investigation would not be complete until I was able to conduct a hands on inspection of that ladies restroom. I arranged for Starfire and I to carry out this investigation on Tuesday, July 25, 2006. With Starfire Tor’s guidance and participation, I conducted an intensive, hands on investigation of the interior and exterior of the ladies restroom. Even though my expertise is critical to this part of the investigation, a great deal of the investigative reasoning could not have been achieved without Starfire Tor’s research criteria and analytical mind.

“Interior Overview: The interior of this ladies restroom, where the time line anomaly occurred, is a small rectangular room about 12 ft by 10 ft. Filling more than half of this area are two narrow stalls with one toilet each, two side-by-side sinks, and a trash basket. There is no furniture, and little free space to move around. The restroom door swings open into the room, taking up valuable space between the stalls and the sinks.

“Walls, Stalls, and Sinks: Most of the walls, the stalls, and the stall doors are covered with a collage of magazine cut outs. The collage design has no detectable seams where a door would slide open. None of the wall surfaces have a hidden door. I checked the two sinks, and the basin they are seated in, for any mechanisms that would allow the sinks to slide away from the wall revealing a door. There are no such mechanisms and no hidden door behind or under the sinks. I also checked the stall toilets for sliding mechanisms, and there are none. There are no hidden doors in the stalls. I checked the wall lighting sconces, a lone wooden shelf, and other hanging wall items and did not find any mechanisms which would reveal a hidden door as there is no hidden door.

“Flooring: The flooring is made of 12 inch squares tiles. None of the tiles, when examined, triggered a hidden door in the floor or elsewhere in the room. The floor has no hidden doors.

“Ceiling: The ceiling has three different heights. The two lower parts are over the sinks and where the front door opens. These lower ceilings contain no vents and no trap doors. The highest part of the ceiling is over the two stalls, and is about 15 ft high. A small chandelier hangs over the outer edge of the stalls near the stall doors. There is a small, square, grated air vent over the stalls, more to the far upper left at the ceiling’s highest point. The air vent is too high to be reached without a ladder, cannot be reached by a person standing on the toilet or stall dividers, and is too far from the chandelier for the lighting fixture to be used as a step down. I could see that the air vent was dusty and undisturbed, indicating that it had not been removed for a long time. Because of the air vent size, height, and location, the woman did not enter the ladies restroom by descending through the ceiling air vent.

“Besides the logistics, the woman and her clothing would have shown signs of having squeezed through a very small opening after crawling through ductwork. By all accounts, the woman was dressed in a skirt, shirt, and high heels that did not show signs of being dirty, dusty, or damaged. A fine layer of dust on the chandelier was not disturbed, which it would have been had someone touched it. Nor were there any signs of how she would have descended from that height, without the help of a ladder or rope. No rope or ladder was visible at the time the woman was seen in and leaving the ladies restroom. Had the woman descended from the small vent, she would have needed a helper up in the ductwork to pull the rope or ladder back up and out of sight. Starfire Tor and I both concluded that this did not happen, because the vent screws were on the inside of the ladies room. No one in the vent would have been able to pull the ladder back up, and then screw the vent closed from inside the ductwork – especially without disturbing the dust on the vent. Besides, Starfire Tor was in the restroom when the woman appeared and did not witness the woman dropping down from the ceiling, which she would have witnessed had it happened. Therefore, the small vent is an air vent and nothing more.

“Adjoining Walls: I further inspected the walls of any room or corridor that has a wall adjoining that ladies restroom. I did this to double confirm that there is no other entrance, even an older one that was sealed. There is no outer adjoining wall with a secondary or hidden door leading into that ladies restroom.

“Door: The obvious way into the ladies restroom is by a wooden door, which is accessed from the main corridor that leads from the dining room staircase to the bar and stage doors beyond. The door is normal size, and pushes open into the ladies restroom. The door is a few feet from the bottom of the staircase, where the stair railing ends in a 3 ft tall post with a flat square wooden top. That position has a good vantage point. It is possible to stand by this post and see who enters and leaves the ladies room, plus see who is standing at the top of the stairs and who is down the corridor.

“I pointed out to Starfire Tor, that once the ladies restroom door is opened it is slow to close. This is due to a controlled closing of the door by a common, hydraulic mechanism fixed at the top of the door. When anyone opens the door, either to enter or exit, the door will slowly inch it’s way closed. Anne would have seen the woman already in the ladies restroom near the sink, or entering the room as Anne exited. But Anne was only aware that Starfire Tor was the sole remaining person in that small room. Starfire was only aware that she was the sole person in the room, once Anne had left. Anne and Starfire, one still inside the room and one exiting to the corridor, believed the same thing about the occupancy of the ladies rest room. When Anne Strieber left that ladies restroom, Starfire Tor was the only person left in there. Yet it is undeniable that another woman exited from a room where Starfire was the sole occupant, and Anne Strieber witnessed this anomaly.

“Even if Anne Strieber had been positioned outside the door, and diverted her attention for a few seconds and someone had slipped into the ladies restroom past her position, Anne would have seen the door ajar and slowly inching its way to close. This would have alerted Anne that someone had opened the door. Furthermore, because the door would have been ajar, Anne would have been able to see the woman standing inside the ladies restroom. At the very least she would have seen Starfire Tor still inside, or possibly even seen the near collision between that woman and Starfire Tor. Inside or outside of the room, Anne Strieber didn’t witness any of these things. From her position she didn’t see the woman entering the ladies restroom, and she didn’t see the door to the ladies room ajar.

“Anne Strieber might have missed one element of the woman’s passage through the door, but from her position she would not have missed all of the markers. From inside the ladies restroom, Starfire might have missed some of the markers, but she would not have missed the biggest marker of all … the woman standing in the ladies restroom only feet away from her.

“Conclusion: Whether the account is that the woman brushed by Anne on Anne’s way out of the ladies restroom, or the woman exited the restroom while Anne was positioned outside the door, the evidence is clear that Anne experienced a woman leaving a room that the woman never entered. This is further corroborated by the experience Starfire Tor had in the restroom, moments after Anne Strieber exited, and that was Starfire’s near collision with a woman who she should have seen but didn’t. No matter how Starfire and I tried to reenact the near collision event in that small space, Starfire could not have missed seeing the woman standing between her and the sinks. Had a woman been standing near the sinks, Starfire would have seen her and there would not have been a near collision.

“My conclusion, which Starfire Tor agrees with, is that the field investigation proves that there is no secondary or hidden door into that ladies restroom. The only way in and out is through the one door at the bottom of the staircase. This dispels any speculation that what Anne and Starfire experienced was orchestrated as a practical joke of the Magic Castle, or one of the stage magicians. Without a hidden door, the set up isn’t there. For all intents and purposes, Anne Strieber witnessed a woman exiting the ladies restroom who did not enter the ladies restroom. For all intents and purposes, Starfire Tor nearly collided with a woman who suddenly appeared near the space that Starfire was occupying.

“If Anne and Whitley Strieber would like to return to the Magic Castle, to conduct their own physical examination of this ladies restroom, Starfire and I can arrange for this to happen.” As you can imagine, we are planning another trip to the Magic Castle very soon!

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